Helen Cho: Space Silence

×

Expand

Helen Cho, "So Many Wind," 2018

video still. Courtesy the artist.

CONVERSATION: Helen Cho and poet Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Saturday, February 22, 2020, at 2pm

Poet Shazia Hafiz Ramji will engage Cho in conversation, reflecting on shared concerns in their work. From pressuring practices of listening to become acts of witnessing, to accounting for the psychic and political tolls of migration, both Cho and Hafiz Ramji are invested in how emotional landscapes can be concretized through artistic practice. In exploring how these concerns differently signify through the written word and through moving images, this conversation will explore where and how the agency of the subject can take root.

WORKSHOP: Plant Meditation with Blackberry: Sunday, February 23 at 2pm

Facilitated by Gina Badger. This event is free but space is limited. Please contact audaingallery@sfu.ca to register.

Helen Cho's exhibition Space Silence incorporates twenty live blackberry (Rubus armeniacus)  plants propogated from an industrial site in Vancouver, east of Main Street between Great Northern Way and the railway tracks. This prolific food and medicine plant is emblematic of waste places and roadsides all over the Pacific Northwest. Like many so-called invasive plants, blackberry is an ecosystem colonizer capable of quickly filling ecological vacuums ultimately created by human disturbance. Convenient narratives about troublesome plants "edging out" native species and of "taking over" natural ecosystems employ xenophobic language while obscuring nuanced conversations about the political ecology of settler colonialism as well as the beneficial properties of the plants themselves. 

What if blackberry could tell its own story? At the workshop, herbalist Gina Badger will lead a plant meditation in dialgoue with the blackberry plants in the exhibition.

WORKSHOP: This Is How Distant I Am: A Workshop Intersecting The Works Of Helen Cho, Theresa Hak Kyung's "Dictee," And The Self Abolished Through The Wreckage Of Context

Wednesday March 4 at 4pm to 6pm 

 Facilitated by Danielle LaFrance. This event is free but space is limited. Please contact audaingallery@sfu.ca to register.

In this workshop, we will collectively and autonomously read, think, write, and converse our way through excerpts from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982), a text that shapes the surfaces and depths of Helen Cho's exhibition Space Silence. We will bring Cho's work into dialogue with the polyvocality of Dictee, which relies on multiple modes and forms of knowing to push against ideological violence and hold onto one's voice while ultimately wreaking a new language.

Drawing from poetry, science fiction and the theories of Charles Darwin, Helen Cho uses materials of mass-production and everyday environs to query relationships between life, death and return. Her videos and sculptures in Space Silence observe the sentience of all beings as they persist through states of transition.

This exhibition presents the first two chapters of a video trilogy that bears witness to the life of Tai Lam, a Vietnamese man based in Toronto by way of an Indonesian refugee camp. While rooted in the harrowing experiences of war and flight from it, these moving image works document the rituals of a life where need is no longer the structuring force of his days. These stories are complemented by a new video that further investigates Cho’s practice of witnessing. In following the musings and murmurings of an elderly woman facing the end of her life, Cho builds up a web of relations that conjoins allusions to Korean shamanic traditions with sculptures that call for activation. Across these works, the sounds, places and materials of daily existence are construed as testimonies to resilience and ephemerality.

Space Silence also includes still-life compositions that draw from the Korean traditions of pyung-sang, which are low wooden platforms familiar in outdoor social spaces and variously used to convene around or as support structures; folk-style chaekgeori, which are images associated with auspicious meanings, symbolizing the desire for a happy life; and suseok, which are naturally occurring rocks that are collected for their aesthetic and symbolic value. Collectively, these sculptural forms ask how our affective responses anchor themselves in material, and how these responses are challenged through mimicry.

Helen Cho is a Toronto based artist whose practice spans sculpture, video, performance, drawing, text, and photography, and draws from translations of language, tradition and the sites and materials of everyday habits. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) and has exhibited internationally.

The attendant reading room includes materials loaned from SFU Library.

Curated by cheyanne turions