Weaving Cultural Identities: Threads Through Time.
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ACT Art Gallery 11944 Haney Place - in The ACT, Maple Ridge, British Columbia V2X 6G1
"Threads Through Time/Weaving Cultural Identities," 2022
The ACT Arts Centre is delighted to host the Vancouver Biennale’s touring exhibition - Weaving Cultural Identities: Threads Through Time.
Explore amazing weavings created by 6 renowned Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh weavers, surrounded by a large Jacquard-woven border.
This exhibition is part of a multi-phase project for the 2018-20 Vancouver Biennale. The project invited Indigenous and multi-ethnic weavers to engage in conversations about colonization and the dividing up of stolen land that followed.
Threads Through Time is an extension of the original 2018 project: Weaving Cultural Identities. For the first time in 300 years, artists from the three Coast Salish nations of Vancouver (Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh) came together to create five individual woven rugs, channeling their experience of the land through the voices of their ancestors. Inspired by this dialogue and in honouring these experiences, a team of Jacquard weavers and a Muslim graphic designer created a large border which holds these weavings together, cumulating to 31 x 15 foot rug.
In this border, a poem by Muslim poet Efemeral is woven into the fabric in Arabic, reflecting the weavers’ acknowledgment and respect to Muslim migrant experiences.
They were exiled from their mosques
And in their mosques martyred
So in the expanse of their exile and martyrdom
They built a mosque
The Weaving Cultural Identities project was inspired by Saudi Arabian artist, Ajlan Gharem’s public installation Paradise Has Many Gates, a chain-link mosque installed in Sen̓áḵw – Vanier Park, Vancouver BC as part of the 2018-2020 Vancouver Biennale curatorial theme: “re-IMAGE-n”. By reimagining Vancouver’s Indigenous and migrant communities’ loss of identity and sacred traditions through displacement, we can work towards reintroducing traditional practices that reflect spiritual healing and cultural restoration.
Featured artists include: Angela George (Squamish and Tsleil Waututh), Chepximiya Siyam’ Chief Janice George (Squamish) and Skwetsimeltxw Willard ‘Buddy’ Joseph (Squamish), Debra Sparrow (Musqueam), Doaa Jamal, Krista Point (Musqueam), Mary Lou Trinkwon, Robyn Sparrow (Musqueam), and Ruth Scheuing.