even the birds are walking - group exhibition

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Latitude 53, "even the birds are walking," 2020

even the birds are walking - curated by Noor Bhangu

Areez Katki, Christina Battle, Durrah Alsaif, Elisabeth Belliveau, Emmanuel Osahor

Solo Exhibition in the Garage: January 24 - April 4, 2020

Lauren Crazybull - Opening Reception | Friday, January 24 from 7-10pm

Noor Bhangu in Conversation with Durrah Alsaif | Opening Night at 6pm

Curatorial Tour of Exhibition | Saturday, January 25 at 2pm

even the birds are walking is a curatorial project that seeks to smooth out the wrinkles of historical and contemporary utopias through inquiry, dialogue, and process. The two exhibitions will center artists that stretch inherited social visions by accommodating cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and interspecial encounters that have the potential to move us to a more inclusive elsewhere, beyond the here and now of environmental and sociopolitical disasters.

It is no coincidence that utopia and desire are hard to define, let alone materialize in the present. In these exhibitions, this theoretical failure emerges in and through the work of artists that question our search for utopia in dialogue with other species. Together, we ask: When the birds take to the pavement, how can we justify our own flight? In its exhibitionary arrest of utopia, even the birds are walking will build an urgency around social movements and attempt to map out a critical groundwork for our future flights.

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories and strategies of presentation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. Her curatorial practice includes projects: Overlapping Violent Histories: A Curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge (2018), womenofcolour@soagallery (2018), Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art (2018), Lines of Difference: The Art of Translating Islam (2019) and Digitalia (2019). In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.

Areez Katki is a multidisciplinary artist & textile practitioner based in Auckland, New Zealand. Drawing from historic and social research, he addresses his value for craft sensibilities through a research driven contemporary practice. Over the duration of his career, Katki has focused on the significance of materiality in the domestic realm through personal processes of fabricating textiles and an ongoing engagement with their narratives. With a background in Art History and an early childhood imbibed in the values of craft, Katki developed a practice based on instinctive responses to textile & fibre research. Often juxtaposing the ephemeral synaesthesic responses to his environment with a subjectivity around formal processes of fabrication that were matrilineally inherited. 

Culminating in richly contextualised bodies of work since 2015, Katki raises questions around the political nature of craft; proclaiming his role as a craftsperson within the realm of contemporary art. The works have addressed social constructs of identity, spirituality and sexuality that have since been explored through various mediums including beaded tapestry weaving, embroidery, paint, sculpture and printmaking.

Christina Battle has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently working toward a PhD in Art & Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario. Her research and artistic work consider the parameters of disaster; looking to it as action, as more than mere event and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. Through this research she imagines how disaster could be utilized as a tactic for social change and as a tool for reimagining how dominant systems might radically shift. She is a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and collaborates with Serena Lee as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries, most recently at: Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Blackwood Gallery (Missisauga), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Untitled Art Society (Calgary), 8-11 (Toronto), Nuit Blanche Toronto, Galveston Artist Residency (Texas), Studio XX (Montreal), Le Centre des arts actuels Skol as part of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (Montreal), Thames Art Gallery (Chatham, ON), Casa Maauad (Mexico City), and SOMArts (San Francisco).

Durrah Alsaif is an interdisciplinary artist, who received her B.F.A. in 2017 from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and was awarded the Margaretha Bootsma Award for Exceptional Achievement in the Graduation Exhibition. She currently has a public artwork in Stadium/Chinatown Skytrain station in Vancouver, BC for her work Qimash as part of the Capture Photography Festival in collaboration with TransLink. Alsaif has exhibited at galleries such as the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, where she was selected as runner-up for the 2nd annual Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize in 2017, and the Surrey Art Gallery, where she was awarded the Second Place 3D Works & Fibre Arts Award in 2018. Also, she has been longlisted for the 2017 BMO 1st Art! Competition. Alsaif believes that addressing and critiquing certain topics, especially through art, is a step toward making change. Originally from Saudi Arabia but now living in Canada, she is interested in exploring and possibly challenging Western perceptions of sociopolitical issues regarding women considered culturally taboo in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Her work often draws attention to the blurring of lines between culture, tradition, and religion in the Middle East. She explores these topics with photography, performance, sculpture, and installation.

Born in Antigonish Nova Scotia, Elisabeth Belliveau completed a BFA at Alberta College of Art and Design in Sculpture and an MFA in Fibres at Concordia University in Montréal. She is a visual artist and a published author of four graphic novels. She has exhibited and screened her work internationally, including at the Holland Animation Festival, Anifest Prague, Lux London UK and with Eyeworks 2017 in LA, Brooklyn and Chicago. She has attended residencies, including stints at Banff Centre for the Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop NY, Tokyo Wondersite-Japan, RAVI – Belgium and the National Film Board of Canada.

Emmanuel Osahor graduated in 2015 with BFA in Art and Design from the University of Alberta. His work has been a subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at the SNAP Gallery, Art Gallery at Milner – Edmonton Public Library, THE WORKS – International Festival of Art and Design, FAB Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, to name just a few. In 2017, Emmanuel Osahor received the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers RISE Award in Arts and Culture. With the assistance of the grants from Edmonton Arts Council, Osahor has embarked on extensive research for his several projects, including “The Distance Between Us”, “You Are Here”, “And Then My Hands Shook”, “Fractures”, ”My Journey”, and “Green Pastures”. These projects – some were collaborative ventures – discuss a broad range of topics, including: aspects of humankind at the beginning of the 21st Century, the nature of dual existence in contemporary society, the human relationship to the past, the role of memory in this experience, immigration, degradation of the communities, the nature of violence in contemporary society, homelessness, and fragility of eco system, among other aspects. These projects use the powerful tool of artistic expression to reflect the artist’s concerns and to document critical aspects of the human condition at this pivotal moment in the history of humankind. Osahor’s large scale installation, “In Search of Eden” was presented during 2018 THE WORKS International Festival of Arts and Design in Edmonton. His other multi-media installation, “Paradise and Folly” was featured in the 2018 Nuit Blanche Edmonton.

Lauren Crazybull is an Edmonton based Blackfoot, Dene visual artist. Lauren's most recent work has looked to explore the tension and power within portraiture by examining the subtle relationship between herself and the subjects she paints. By centring the gaze, beauty and rich humanity of fellow Indigenous people in her recent work, Lauren means to ask poignant questions about how Indigenous identities can be represented, experienced, celebrated and understood through the particular gaze that artistry casts and requires. In 2019, Lauren was appointed as Alberta’s first Artist in Residence. In 2018, she was awarded the McLuhan house year long studio residency. Before fully immersing into the visual art world, Lauren worked for 4 years in radio and broadcasting focusing on Indigenous issues. Following that, she worked for 2 years as the art coordinator at a centre for at-risk youth.  Through this work, she understands that her creative power is a poignant way to assert her own humanity, and advocate, in diverse and subtle ways, for the innate intellectual, spiritual, creative and political fortitude of Indigenous people.