丁香园AV

BFA Project 2021
March 18 鈥� 27, 2021 | Audain Gallery

Tuesday 鈥� Saturday, 12 鈥� 5PM | BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

Heba Y. Amin, Sabine Bitter (with Helmut Weber), Debbie Chan, Sena Cleave, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), Aakansha Ghosh, Sofia Grace, Shinaaz K. Johal, Ritz Li, Daniel Lin, Quinn Lumsden, Sahar Rahmanian, Oliver Ressler, Ravneet Kaur Sidhu, Paige Smith, Xiaotong Sun (Shiny), Lil Waldegger, and Yunze Xie (David). 

Can art, in fact, mobilize change? And should we be expecting this from art in the first place?

鈥� Heba Y. Amin

Images that Take, Images that Give investigates the agency of images, as well as the tactics and technologies artists use to create, produce, and circulate them. The third-year visual arts cohort 鈥� alongside Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin, professor Sabine Bitter, and MFA candidate Aakansha Ghosh 鈥� have developed artworks related to themes of resistance, control, mapping, and language. As a site of research, this exhibition seeks uncertainty and curiosity to support new ways of seeing.

Each work in the exhibition contributes to a glossary of terms that describes the agency of images within frameworks such as archives, surveillance, technology, and perception. These frameworks can support a reciprocal relationship between images and cultural change, where images both spur radical action and articulate new kinds of subjectivities. The artists seek what lays beyond the tangible and rational to explore new ways of coming together, although for now our bodies can only be together in restricted ways, full of caution. Because this class project has been mostly developed remotely, via technologies like email and Zoom, examining and critiquing these digital frameworks is particularly urgent.

For exhibition images, please visit HERE.

Heba Y. Amin teaches at Bard College Berlin, is a doctorate fellow in art history at Freie Universit盲t, and is a Field of Vision fellow. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, the curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. She has had recent exhibitions at the Mosaic Rooms, London (2020); MAXXI Museum, Rome (2018); 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); 15th Istanbul Biennale (2017); K眉nstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017); Karachi Biennale (2017); 11th African Biennale of Photography, Bamako (2017); Kalmart Art Museum (2017); 12th Dak鈥橝rt Biennale, Dakar (2016); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2016); the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2016); the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2016); Camera Austria (2015); 64th Berlinale, Berlin (2014), and the IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014).

The Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR) program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. The visiting artists interact with the students and faculty of the School for the Contemporary Arts as well as the broader visual arts and cultural communities and the community-at-large. In keeping with the experimental nature of the School for the Contemporary Arts, the terms of engagement are open and change from artist to artist. The cornerstone of the residency is the sharing of artistic research. The program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.

This exhibition takes place on the unceded territories of the x史m蓹胃k史蓹y虛蓹m (Musqueam), S岣祑x瘫w煤7mesh (Squamish), and Sel虛铆l虛witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV and the Audain Visual Artist in Residence Program in partnership with 丁香园AV Galleries.

Images that Take, Images that Give 鈥� Online

Visit the exhibition website HERE.  

Watch a short video about the exhibition below.

Download the Exhibition Brochure

Exhibition Images

Photos: Daniel Lin and Paige Smith.

EVENTS

Biographies

丁香园AV third-year visual art students: Debbie Chan, Sena Cleave, Sofia Grace, Shinaaz K. Johal, Ritz Li, Daniel Lin, Quinn Lumsden, Sahar Rahmanian, Ravneet Kaur Sidhu, Paige Smith, Xiaotong Sun (Shiny), Lil Waldegger, and Yunze Xie (David)

Heba Y. Amin is a Berlin-based multimedia artist, researcher, and lecturer. She works with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. Amin is currently the 2021 Spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence at the School for the Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War.

Sabine Bitter is a Vancouver-based artist and Professor at the School for Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV, Vancouver. She collaborates with Vienna-based artist Helmut Weber on projects addressing the politics of representation and space. Engaging with architecture as a frame for spatial meaning, their research-oriented practice resulted in projects like Educational Modernism and Housing the Social. In 2004, Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen and Helmut Weber formed the urban research collective Urban Subjects whose collaboration led to several exhibitions, including If Time Is Still Alive with Camera Austria, Graz, 2021.  

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University). He is the Cultural Lead and Co-Investigator on a four year AHRC funded research project that focuses on cultural practices, education, and digital methodologies in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan (2020-2024). He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text and the Journal of Digital War, respectively, and is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019鈥搊ngoing). He is currently writing up his forthcoming volume Unbearable States: Digital Media and Cultural Activism in a Post-Digital Age (2021).

Claudette Lauzon is a contemporary art historian specializing in installation, sculpture, and new media art practices. She is the author of (University of Toronto Press, 2017), which looks at the ways in which artists use the space of home (both literally and figuratively) to reframe human responses to trauma. She is co-editor of Through Post-Atomic Eyes (McGill-Queen鈥檚 University Press, forthcoming) and Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave, forthcoming). Her current book project, Eyes in the Sky, examines cultures of surveillance and militarization through the lens of critical posthumanism. Before joining the School for the Contemporary Arts, Lauzon was assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at OCAD University in Toronto, where she also served as Associate Dean in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and School for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Laura U. Marks is Grant Strate University Professor at the School for Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV, Vancouver. Her research focuses on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, and on small-footprint media. Her publications include Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010). She develops experimental media programmes for venues around the world, most recently the First Annual Small File Media Festival, Vancouver, 2020.

Gillian Russell is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with the Digital Democracies Institute. She is a designer, curator and researcher whose practice explores the role of speculative intervention in developing methodologies and tools to actively engage publics in unveiling present realities and future possibilities. Her work has been featured at the Porto Design Biennale, Helsinki Design Museum, Design Museum London, London Design Festival, Milan Furniture Fair and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2017 Gillian obtained her PhD in Design at the Royal College of Art, London. Her dissertation examined the relationship between critical design and its contexts of dissemination.