Walking in Ethnocidal Places
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
February 21 – March 1, 2025
Audain Gallery – SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 Hastings St., Vancouver
Opening: February 20, 5:00 PM
Haunting is the cost of subjugation.
—Eve Tuck and C. Ree
. . . for even the mundane act of cobbling has cosmic ramifications.
—Elliot R. Wolfson
This anamnesis supposes duration.
—Jacques Coursil
Walking in Ethnocidal Places presents traces and documentation from two social projects co-directed by Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, بيان الصعود إلى السماء flight manifesto (2019-24) and Estery Wierzba / Esther’s Willow (2018- ), a culmination of his doctoral work in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
Propelled choreographically by practices in listening-as-composition, community research, counter-memorialization, traditional culture, and ambulatory ritual, the projects respectively attempt to intervene with/in and between local sites constituent of enclosure, expropriation, and genocide. Further, the shape of each work is guided by the directives, relations, and legacies of a nonhuman entity.
In بيان الصعود إلى السماء, a shifting collective of hearing and Deaf co-authors engage in long-distance discourse with hard-of-hearing sound artist Dirar Kalash to design and enact a silent walk in three parts over 13 months up the Nooksack River: an anti-survey and visceral confrontation with foundational architectures of settler-colonization in Whatcom County (US). Kalash retroactively scored the walk in his family home, creating a seven-hour sonic composition during the Gaza genocide.
In Estery Wierzba, Katarzyna Sala and Marta Sala, third-generation residents on the unnamed Esther's Square, collaborate with Sniderman to mobilize local cultural workers, residents, descendants, and survivors of the city of Chrzanów (PL) to re-plant a white willow sapling where its elder for decades hovered the concealed foundations of the city's destroyed Great Synagogue.
EVENTS
Opening Reception
Thursday, February 20, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Closing Reception and Artist Talk
with guests Dirar Kalash & Nastaran Saremy
Saturday, March 1, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Audain Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 PM – 5 PM
BIOGRAPHIES
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman is a poet-artist and fourth generation Ashkenazi American settler from Philadelphia (US) and other places in the traditional territory of the Lenape diaspora, with ancestral ties to eradicated Jewish communities in Warsaw, Jaroslaw and Rzeszów (PL), Chișinău (MLD), Dnipro (UKR), and Seirijai (LITH). Recent works include the durational contemplation Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee (2016-19); the film Night Herons (2021), recipient of the 2024 ING Polish Art Foundation Main Prize, created with Joanna Rajkowska; and the exilic memorial Axa Xeyal Kirin Imagined Land خاکی خەیاڵکراو being created with Nastaran Saremy. He is Assistant Professor in Socially Engaged Art at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Dirar Kalash is a musician and sound artist, based in Palestine, whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. Kalash also extends his practice into inter-disciplinary theoretical research. He has produced several solo and collaborative musical albums and is active as touring musician, in addition to that he also created several sound installations, live audio-visual performances, field recordings and soundscape compositions series under the title of Sonic Front.
Based in Berlin, Katarzyna Sala co-creates literary and artistic projects, focusing on the culture of memory, contemporary literature and the intersections of literature, art and social affairs. The latest projects are Esther’s Willow 2021-2024, Work break in Görli. Artistic relations systems in public space 2021/2022, Û∞-Berlîn Eine kreativ-anarchistische urbane Flucht-Chronik 2020, and an anthology of Kurdish poems Kurdish Voices from Rojava / Dengên helbestvanên kurd ji Rojava.
Marta Sala is a transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin who often works in collaboration with groups and individuals. She focuses on issues such as intersectionality, right to the city, ecology and the commons and explores the problem of waste, marginalization and solidarity in diversity. She creates works from various material remains to extract individual poetic narratives. Her artistic practice includes painting, installation, sewing, costume design, video, performance, participative and public art.
Nastaran Saremy is a Kurdish-Iranian interdisciplinary researcher and critic in the field of cultural and social analysis and aesthetics. She majored in Philosophy and Aesthetics, now doing her PhD in Media and Communication studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her area of interest is revolution and social change, especially the ways in which the social praxis is aesthetically composed. In her PhD, she aims to explore how memory practices and mnemonic projects mobilize or constrain social transformation in societies undergoing rapid political change, and thereby shed light on the relationship between the collective memories and social movements. She has presented her works in various conferences worldwide and published works in different journals, books and catalogues, in Farsi and English.
CREDITS
Certain artworks, traces, or documentation in the exhibition also include the authorship of Wil Henkel, Miguel Azuaga, Cynthia Camlin, Sophie Cortes, Cheong Kin Man, Justin Collins, Sean Prestia, Śomi Dominika Śniegocka, Paul Helmich, Catherine Rose Evans.
بيان الصعود إلى السماء flight manifesto was co-authored with Brel Froebe, Harlin/Hayley Steele, Cascadia Deaf Nation (Ashanti Monts Tréviska, Gareth Magiskog, Chell Hull, Rei Lung, Gabriel Perrusquia), Cynthia Camlin, Justin Collins, Yessenia Moncada, Andrew Babson, Yanara Friedland, Vanessa Malapote-Blandino, Elizabeth Kerwin, Jillian Froebe, Zoë Fassett-Manuszewski, Carly Lloyd, Sophie Cortes, Emma Blakslee; received research support from Joshua Olsen, Julie Mauermann, Tli’nuk’dzwidzi/Althea Wilson, X'welwelat'se William John, Mary Tuti Baker, Regina Jeffries, Peter Rand, Dolores Calderón, Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, Whatcom Peace and Justice Center, Benjamin Kersten, Aisha Mansour, Tamyka Bullen, Raj Singh, Clovis B; and received funding support from Simon Fraser University, Western Washington University, and Square One Foundation.
Estery Wierzba / Esther’s Willow was produced by FestivALT in partnership with Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Museum, Municipal Center of Culture, Sport and Recreation of Chrzanów, Urban Memory Foundation, Fundacja Zapomniane, Municipal Public Library of Chrzanów; received research support from Dr. Marek Tuszewicki; and received funding support from Simon Fraser University, Allianz Kulturstiftung for Europe, and the European Union.
SPECIAL THANKS
The artist wishes to express his gratitude to the years of support provided by his PhD committee: Dr. Claudette Lauzon (advisor), Dr. Jeff Derksen, Dr. Kirsten Emiko McAllister, and Althea Thauberger.
This exhibition is presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Contemporary Arts.
Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU