Experiments in Art and Ethnography
An installation
November 23, 2019 | 10:15AM – 3:45PM
4th Floor – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Presented as part of Changing Climates, the 2019 Canadian Anthropology Society and American Anthropological Association conference, Experiments in Art and Ethnography is a multimodal installation that showcases work by faculty and students from our interdisciplinary art school, where a core mission is collaboration across artistic and academic disciplines. Works included explore how art and social justice struggles articulate here and around the world. Attendees are invited to join participants at a concluding roundtable for conversations about experiments in art and ethnography.
Owen Underhill (SCA Faculty: Music)
Kwak’wala Languagescape (with some English translation)
An eight-channel pre-recorded composition created from interviews with Dr. Robert Joseph, Hereditary Chief, Gwawaenuk First Nation (Kwakwaka’wakw) and one of a small number of speakers of the Kwak’wala language.
Laura Marks (SCA Faculty: Art, Performance & Cinema Studies)
Affections
A 24-minute 2016 film by Grahame Weinbren and Laura Marks based on Marks’ 2015 book Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image introduces experimental Arab works described in the book and uses a hilarious self-interview technique to raise the questions that everyone is thinking but nobody asks.
Henry Daniel (SCA Faculty: Dance)
nómadas
A six-channel audio/two-channel video installation that considers the movements of ‘travellers’, ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’ as transnational choreography. nómadas interrogates deep fragmentation among communities, nationalized and personalized bodies, and social and political institutions and the ordinary people they were meant to serve.
Sky Hopinka (SCA Faculty: Film)
Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer
A two-channel 13-minute synchronous loop that tells the complex Seminole history of Fort Marion, also known as Castillo de San Marcos, built in 1672. The work traces the persistence of presence and memory experienced through confinement and incarceration, and small samplings of space and hope.
Peter Dickinson (SCA Faculty: Art, Performance & Cinema Studies) and Rob Kitsos (SCA Faculty: Dance)
Normate: Instructions for Incorrect Assembly
Working from interview transcripts focused on constructs of normality and abnormality, this experimental performance explores how language, gesture, sound and image might complicate preconceptions of the problematic fit between bodies and social categories.
Simone Rapisarda (SCA Faculty: Film), Dara Culhane (SFU Faculty: Anthropology), Carr Sappier (SCA Alumni), Eveleen Kozak (SCA Alumni)
Playing With Worlds
Amultimodal installation showcasing 360° videos created by 15 children in rural British Columbia in response to a plea for help sent by extraterrestrial entities from planet Y2B who are hoping to rebuild their planet after an environmental catastrophe.
Hannah Campbell, Joey Zaurrini, and Ghinwa Yassine (SCA MFA candidates)
In My Way: Out of Site
An installation that makes use of sound, video and sculpture to explore the codes of the streets as liminal spaces of power where emotional boundaries are reclaimed while fragility feeds fear of others.
Casper Leerink and Xinyue Liu (SCA MFA candidates)
De grond /
An interactive video installation that invites visitors to create connections between nomadic objects brought to Canada from two different countries and a domestic soundscape.
Sponsored by the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts and the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography.