Survival Guide

Name: Survival Guide
Start: 2017-01-28T00:00:00
End: 2017-05-08T00:00:00
Location: Art Gallery of Alberta

Jan 28, 2017 to May 7, 2017

Art Gallery of Alberta 2 Winston Churchill Square, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 2C1

January 12, 2017

11:29 AM

Antti Laitinen, "Bark Boat," 2010

HD video still, courtesy of the Artist

Opening Reception, Artists talks and performances: Saturday, January 28

7:30–10 pm

In connection to the opening of Survival Guide, exhibition artists Scott Rogers, Brendan Michal Heshka and Patrick Cruz will be holding brief talks and performances in the gallery space.

Program schedule is as follows:

1:30PM: Scott Rogers performance and talk

2:30PM: Brendan Michal Heshka performance

3:30PM: Patrick Cruz artist talk

The more you know, the less you carry. – Mors Kochanski

How do we adapt and process current shifting political, economic, personal and environmental challenges to our safety and stability? Featuring photographic, print, sculpture, video and performance artworks, Survival Guide examines strategies for survival within a contemporary art context.

Curator’s statement

Survival Guide relates artworks that demonstrate the action of transferring knowledge from one individual to the next, as part of a collective survivalism. Projects by artists and bushcraft expert, Mors Kochanski, examine cogent survivalist strategies within a contemporary art context: how to adapt and process current shifting political, economic, personal and environmental challenges to individual safety and stability.

Collective and communal survival is often based on a process of triaging the best way to adapt to untenable circumstances. Individually, we each rely on the embedded knowledge of material form and prescribed use value of its potentialities within the hierarchical needs of our daily life, depending on inherent knowing given to us by crafted techniques, navigation and constellations of connectedness that give rise to the conditions of autonomy.

Survival Guide asserts that independence is still reliant on the designs and codes inherently shared by another. The exhibition includes works by contemporary artists that exemplify processes of creative exchange and the principles of communal artistic practice, working toward a shared approach in realizing an improved future cultural legacy that writer Lisa Robertson defines as “survival as a life-beyond-life.”