2010 CULTURAL OLYMPIAD: THE WORLD IS WATCHING
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"The Quilt of Belonging"
"The Quilt of Belonging" at Surrey Art Gallery. PHOTO: © NICK WOLOCHATIUK
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"The Candahar"
Theo Simms, "The Candahar," 2007. Installation photos: Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg.
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"The Candahar"
Theo Simms, "The Candahar," 2007. Installation photos: Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg.
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"Memoria I, 24.10.07 (detail),"
Gabriel de la Mora, "Memoria I, 24.10.07 (detail)," calcium sulphate with cyanoacrylate application, resin base and stainless steel supports, 2007. Courtesy OMR Gallery, Mexico City. From ,i>Visceral Bodies at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
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Kike-in painting the thliitsapilthim of Ha’wilth Nuukmiis
Kike-in painting the thliitsapilthim of Ha’wilth Nuukmiis of the House of Iiwaasaht, Opitsat-h, Tla-o-qui-aht, winter 1988-89, Vancouver, B.C.
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"Wiiwimta-eyk‚ Thliitsapilthim"
"Wiiwimta-eyk‚ Thliitsapilthim," painted by Kike-in, c. early 1970s, 9' X 23'. Image courtesy of Wiiwimta-eyk, Christina Cox.
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"The Quilt of Belonging"
"The Quilt of Belonging" at Surrey Art Gallery. PHOTO: © NICK WOLOCHATIUK
2010 CULTURAL OLYMPIAD: THE WORLD IS WATCHING
Complementing the Winter Games, Vancouver will host hundreds of arts events. We've chosen a few hot tickets.
BY Beverly Cramp
When the starter’s pistol goes off in late January, Vancouverites and visitors will be rushing to soak up as much culture as has ever been hosted in the city at one time. Programmed as a companion to the 2010 Winter Olympics, and running through mid-March, the Cultural Olympiad will bring a five-ring circus of arts events to the region — music, theatre, dance, film, new media, and more. Among the Olympiad’s visual arts exhibitions — a giant quilt made of 263 squares, a moveable tea party celebrated with people around the world, a mock-up of an Irish pub, part sculptural, part performance art, First Nations stories told on painted banners — these are our picks for shows not-to-be-missed.
Funded as part of the overall Vancouver sponsorship for the Games, the Olympiad has given the region’s arts groups an opportunity to create ambitious shows, and showcase the city and its artists to a global audience.
The Vancouver Art Gallery plans three Cultural Olympiad exhibitions in addition to their existing show list for January and February. Visceral Bodies complements an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci anatomical drawings (The Mechanics of Man from Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Collection) with artworks from 18 contemporary artists known for investigations into the human form. They include pieces by Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Helen Chadwick and VALIE EXPORT.
The Gallery will display two of their Olympiad exhibitions on the gallery’s exterior. “As a curatorial group, we decided we wanted to not only have stellar exhibits on the inside of the gallery, but to also indicate from the exterior that this is a happening place,” says Daina Augaitis, chief curator and associate director of the Gallery. “Video art is one of the projects we proposed and that was accepted. Video was a rambunctious rebel in the 1960s and over the last decade has become a principle art form. It moved from the margins to the centre.”
CUE: Artists’ Videos will screen close to 90 different video art displays from 75 artists daily on a large LED screen on the south side of the Gallery (only between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. will the screen go dark). The street, in effect, becomes an outdoor exhibition space. CUE is co-curated by Augaitis and New York-based video art curator Christopher Eamon.
On the north side of the Gallery, Taiwanese artist Michael Lin will cover the gallery’s facade with a giant hand-painted mural. Lin is known for his adaptations of traditional Taiwanese fabric designs and colours, which he uses to cover architectural forms. This will be the first time Lin’s work will be presented in Canada. Michael Lin: A Modest Veil invites people to think about the Gallery’s history and its architecture, in light of the city’s diverse cultural traditions.
In the neighbouring city of Surrey, the Surrey Art Gallery will show a giant textile exhibition. Quilt of Belonging is a 36-metre tapestry made from items such as African mud cloth, Salish weaving, appliquéd butterfly wings and beaded silk. Each of the 263 squares has been added by immigrant and First Nations artists in Canada to represent something unique from each of their cultures.
On the city’s downtown eastside, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) is transforming into a giant tea room and performance space to celebrate one of China’s significant contributions to the world. Called World Tea Party, people will be invited to drop in and sip a cup of tea. On any given day or evening Japanese tea ceremonies may be in progress or Squamish First Nation herbal tea events featuring artist and herbalist Cease Wyss. Lead “tea party artist” Bryan Mulvihill, also known as Trolley Bus, has hosted tea parties from London, New Delhi and Beijing to Vancouver, including a stop at the National Gallery of Canada in 1993.
Computers will be available so guests and participating artists can connect on Skype with other people around the world, extending the hospitality world-wide. “Our idea is not to define the exhibit but to create the vessel to let the audience be the event,” says Hank Bull, Centre A’s executive director.
If tea isn’t a strong enough drink for some gallery-goers, they can take in Presentation House Gallery’s The Candahar, a recreation of an Irish pub that examines the tradition of bars in art works. Part sculpture, part installation, part performance art, The Candahar is also a functioning bar where the public can order an ale or two from two Belfast bartenders who act as unscripted performers. Presentation House will install The Candahar in the Festival House Theatre on Granville Island.
“We wanted to take our Cultural Olympiad program into the crowd rather than have the crowd try to come to us,” says Reid Shier, director and curator of PHG. “North Vancouver is kind of off the beaten track. And I knew about The Candahar from previous instalments in Canada, including Calgary and the Montreal Biennale. There have been many different art projects about bars. The [Toronto-based] artist collective General Idea most famously did a Colour Bar Lounge in 1979 at the Basel Art Fair.”
First Nations, particularly Coastal artworks will be front and centre during the Cultural Olympiad, notably as part of Backstory: Nuu-chah-nulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ki-Ke-In at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. Based on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, for thousands of years the Nuu-chah-nulth people painted family stories on ceremonial curtains. Originally these large narrative works about everyday life, as well as mythical ancestral milestones, were painted on available materials such as cedar planks. Later, sailcloth and cotton were used to record culturally significant stories — marriage and naming ceremonies, mourning and reconciliation — paintings of humans, animals and spirits, dynamic cultural and personal records by the Nuu-chah-nulth. In the Belkin show, historical curtains are combined with contemporary works by Ron Hamilton (Ki-Ke-In), a modern-day storyteller, artist and scholar.
A complete listing of Cultural Olympiad events is at www.vancouver2010.com