Memories of the Future III: Diyan Achjadi and Cindy Mochizuki
to
Roedde House Museum 1415 Barclay Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6G 1J6
Cindy Mochizuki, "Sue Sada Was Here," 2018
film still, (courtesy of the artist)
For Memories of the Future III artists Diyan Achjadi and Cindy Mochizuki respond to the history and domestic setting of the Roedde House. Now a museum, this 1893 heritage home originally housed the family of Gustav Roedde, one of Vancouver’s first bookbinders. The artists each consider an element of the museum’s print history, including the Roedde’s successful printing business and the decorative arts typical of the late 19th century. Inserting their artworks within the period rooms, the artists interrupt the museum’s dominant story of a middle-class European immigrant family and speak to Canada’s difficult colonial history, which continues to shape the nation’s present. Memories of the Future III features an installation of prints and a collection of textiles by Achjadi and a new experimental dance film by Mochizuki that collapse fact and fiction and interweave official and counter histories.
This exhibition is the third in a series of projects inviting contemporary artists to create artworks in response to the traditional stories told by historic house museums in Canada. Through a range of mediums and approaches, these site-specific interventions explore the layered and hidden stories of our socio-material histories.
Curated by Katherine Dennis
Visitor’s Stitch and Sip Sunday, November 18, 1–3 p.m
Diyan Achjadi and Cindy Mochizuki host an afternoon of desserts and embroidery at the Roedde House Museum. Participants draw and embroider onto handkerchiefs using European and Japanese (bunka shishu) styles of needlework. Coffee, tea and sweets in response to the complex history of the site will be served.
Diyan Achjadi’s work responds to the ways that cross-cultural contaminations are visualized in popular illustration and decorative art practices. Using drawing, printmaking and animation, she constructs fictional tableaux to explore the impact of historical interactions on contemporary sociopolitical contexts. She has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of a 2017 artist-initiated public art commission from the City of Vancouver. Achjadi was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to a West Javanese father and an English Canadian mother, and spent her childhood moving between Jakarta, Hong Kong, London and Washington, DC. She received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art (New York) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal). She lives and works in Vancouver, and is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation and drawing. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its relationship to site-specificity, invisible histories, archives and memory work. Her artistic process moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, chance, improvisation and engaging communities. She has exhibited and screened her work in Canada, the US and Asia. In 2015, she received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Film and New Media from the City of Vancouver. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She lives and works in Vancouver.
Memories of the Future was collaboratively conceived and developed by curators Noa Bronstein and Katherine Dennis. Memories of the Future III at the Roedde House Museum is independently curated by Katherine Dennis.