丁香园AV

2023 MA Symposium
December 6, 2023 | 5:00 PM 鈥� 8:00 PM | Doors at 4:30 PM | FREE
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

There is no love that is not an echo 鈥� Theodor Adorno

The 2023 MA Symposium is an address to the echoes of art that materialize across time, in our bodies, and the world. Our analyses seek to re:verb, to reintroduce infinities into acts and artworks presumed contained. Sound, material, performance, protest, and affect reverberate with us, and in the spirit of Adorno鈥檚 quote, each work here stands as its own love letter to their imponderable vibrations.

MA Cohort: Roman Dubrule, Jason Kennedy, Clara Lam, Juliet Li, Dale MacDonald, and Abede Mohammadi.

Schedule

Dale MacDonald: IT鈥橲 ALIVE!: Dissecting Horror Affects through Immanence, Liveness, and Titus Andronicus

Clara Lam: A Rhizome of Protests: The Collective Force of Street Art and Political Actions Fortifying a Social Movement

Jason Kennedy: Anahatha Nadam: How a Vibrational Practice of Material Drones can Catalyze Conscious Transformation

[Break]

Juliet Li: One Foot in the Past, The Other in the Contemporary: A Close Analysis on Scarlet Peking Opera

Abede Mohammadi: Returning to Chaos: Siah Armajani, Home and the 鈥楻uptures of Reference'

Roman Dubrule: Finding Meaning in Petr V谩lek鈥檚 Noise: Taoist Meditations on Affect and Paradox in Experimental Music

Biographies

Roman Dubrule is a Franco-Albertan MA student finishing his second year at 丁香园AV鈥檚 School for the Contemporary Arts. His experiences include performing, composing, and recording as a freelance musician; launching an impromptu career as show-host and head of programming for two French-Canadian radio stations; and slinging wine in the scenic Okanagan Valley. Holding a BMus in Jazz and Contemporary Music with a Major in Performance from MacEwan University, Roman is now engaging more deeply with his alternate passions for philosophy, writing, and film during his Master鈥檚 studies, to continue elaborating on the importance of art in the meaningful development of societies and self. Roman鈥檚 academic interests lie generally at the intersections of sound, mindfulness, process philosophy, Taoism, affect theory, and cosmology. Above all, he believes that listening deeply to the world around us can transform us into more compassionate, ecological, and musical beings.

Jason Kennedy (Un:Known as Bartolom茅) is an international contemporary nomad with a USA passport. After receiving a BA in Jazz Performance and an MA in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University (NYC), he has been an ambassador for the positive transformational potential of vibration through arts education in five countries over the past 14 years. Jason (formerly Un:Known as Bartolom茅) researches the cosmopolitical practice of Mui Sim Nora Lim - a Singaporean Yogi and Sound practitioner who relocated to Vancouver from her sharanam in India. Lim's vibrational Yoga practice verbs the inter-mat-timbral drone frequencies of wood, brass, metal, stone, glass, water, and bio-organics - what is Un:Known as the "Sonorium" - upon practitioners bodies, dissolving established and traditioned internal boundaries of normation.

Clara Lam is an arts administrator and an aspiring curator. She has a BFA in Fashion Marketing and Management and work experience in branding, communications, organizing exhibitions, programming and co-curating international museum collection tours. Pivoting from the intersection of arts, culture and fashion in Hong Kong, she relocated to Vancouver and embarked on a journey of unidentifying herself in hopes of exploring her possible contributions to worlding worlds. Her current research concerns street art and political actions as a fortifying collective force in a social movement, and the rhizomatic assemblage of its oppositional consciousness that transcends spatiotemporal limitations.

Juliet Li hails from the south part of China, and is a theater fanatic and a movie lover. She was bonded with performance since her first ballet lesson at 4. She began her academic inquiry into theater during her undergraduate degree at Queen鈥檚 University, Kingston. Most recently, her research interests include film and performance aesthetics, performance theory, film theory, Chinese opera, and literature on performance and film. She is always drawn to the liveness and humanness in performance and films. To her, liveness is being present and humanness means humanity.

Dale MacDonald is a writer, educator, and artist working in so-called Vancouver since 2016. Since completing his BA/EBd at the Univeristy of Alberta, Dale has taught high school drama, directed a youth theatre company, and published his play, maleficarum, in the Pull Festival Anthology. Dale's current curiosities include natural fabric dyes, how magic organizes bodies in ritual, and the ethics of allowing our corpses to rot freely. If he's not being hypnotized by the glow of the library search bar, he's probably playing video games with his partner and cat or running really, really far.

Abede Mohammadi is a second-year MA student with experience researching contemporary Iranian art, publishing, and curating. In her research, she looks at the unhomely through art's cosmological origins and forces, where constructing the unnecessary becomes a getaway for returning to chaos. Abede's current interests lie in contemporary art practices in her homeland, Kurdistan. She is particularly drawn to works that engage with the land, mountains, plants, fabrics, and labour, evoking environmental and ethnographical meanings.

Thank You

Peter Dickinson, Claudette Lauzon, Laura U. Marks, Denise Oleksijczuk, Eldritch Priest, Sabine Bitter, Stefan Maier, Emily Neumann, Brady Cranfield.