SWARM

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Gallery1C03, "SWARM," 2022

Artists' Talk March 10, 2022

7:00 - 8:30 pm CT on Zoom Register to attend.

Join members of the SWARM Collective for a conversation about their online exhibition, SWARM! Moderated by exhibition co-curator and SWARM member Dallas Cant, the talk will include discussion with the artist-researchers about the context for their work in the exhibition, including relationship to pollinators and ideas of sympoiesis or making-with.

ASL interpretation and live auto-captioning will be available.

Gallery 1C03 is pleased to host SWARM, an online exhibition program of the SWARM artist collective. In addition to a film screening and public discussion, SWARM includes the launch of the arc.hive, a virtual sympoetic space that holds the work of 8 artist-researchers. Through beading technologies, digital worlding, embroidery, sculpture, storytelling, poetics, sound, and performance works, artists Dallas Cant, Roewan Crowe, Lorena Sekwan Fontaine, Franchesca Hebert-Spence, Kaliesa Beasse McGillvray, Hailey Primrose, Willow Rector, and Maram Rocha, present work developed in a context of sympoiesis, or, making-with. This research-creation project, partially funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, is based out of the greenhouse artlab at The University of Winnipeg.

Much like the honeybee swarms that inspired the collective’s name, SWARM considers how making and thinking practices attuned to process might function as practical strategies for becoming better humans in the Chthulucene. In particular, SWARM grapples with a turning toward – to one another, relationality and to pollinators and plants themselves – as a way of holding and caring for ecological pasts, presents, and futures in entangled relationality. In doing so, we ask what might we learn from pollinators? What might they teach us in crafting methods of ongoingness in this time of climate trouble?

Facing a global pandemic has certainly forced a shift in the collective’s working and being together, yet it has not drawn us away from our intentions: finding ways to stay with and make meaning out of the crises and devastation brought about by capitalism, colonialism, and the intertwined doctrines of oppression which uphold them. While we may not be able to gather as closely as some pollinators do, we now forge solitary pods of thinking and artmaking - turning inward then reaching out. In this way, we continue being-with the pollinators, and in a small way we feel closer to them.

SWARM is curated by Dallas Cant and Roewan Crowe, in collaboration with Jennifer Gibson at Gallery 1C03.

ONLINE PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Conversation with SWARM artists

March 10, 7:00 – 8:30 pm CT

Honeyland Film Screening

March 11 – 18, 2022

Presented in partnership with the Winnipeg Film Group.

Watch Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s powerful 2019 film Honeyland online for free

As part of the SWARM exhibition and in partnership with the SWARM collective and the Winnipeg Film Group, Gallery 1C03 is thrilled to present a free virtual screening of Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s feature film Honeyland.

About the film

“Nestled in an isolated mountain region deep within the Balkans, Hatidze Muratova lives with her ailing mother in a village without roads, electricity or running water. She’s the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers, eking out a living farming honey in small batches to be sold in the closest city – a mere four hours’ walk away. Hatidze’s peaceful existence is thrown into upheaval by the arrival of an itinerant family, with their roaring engines, seven rambunctious children and herd of cattle. Hatidze optimistically meets the promise of change with an open heart, offering up her affections, her brandy and her tried-and-true beekeeping advice.”

Honeyland will be available to stream for free as part of the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque at Home program from March 11th, 12:00 AM CT until March 18th, 11:59 PM CT. Honeyland is 90 minutes long. Dialogue in Turkish with English subtitles. Content Advisories: physical violence, death.

This screening emerges from the SWARM collective, a team of 8 artist-researchers working out of the greenhouse artlab at the University of Winnipeg, who consider the film's themes and concepts nestled at the intersection of contemporary art and cross-species relationalities. They ask: what can be learned from the bees in this time of climate crisis? What might happen and what might we notice when we start-with and centre the beyond human in creative and research-based processes?