Will Kwan: Exclusion Acts
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Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 205-268 Keefer Street (Sun Wah Centre), Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1X5
Will Kwan, "Endemic #3 (Having a field day)," 2021
digital print
Will Kwan: Exclusion Acts
Curated by Henry Heng Lu
Online Artist Talk: Saturday, April 10, 2021, 2:15 – 3:45 PM
Centre A’s curator and interim executive director Henry Heng Lu will be in conversation with the Toronto-based artist about his exhibition Exclusion Acts at Centre A. Their conversation will discuss different manifestations of inequality explored in the exhibition.
Link and more programming coming soon.
This exhibition brings together a number of new photo, text, and media-based works that take an unflinching look at the systemic and absurd ways that economic ideology shapes social relations and beliefs. The works examine a range of conditions, from the racialization of low wage and precarious labour, to the financialization of housing by private equity, to the fanatical neoliberal rhetoric used to support the supremacy of the economy. Seen in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the works in the exhibition portray not an inflection point, but systems and minds trapped in a recursive state—inertia, entrenchment, business as usual.
Will Kwan is a Hong Kong-born Canadian artist whose work examines the diverse ways that hegemony is produced through economic systems and cultural narratives. His work is held in the permanent collections of M+ (Hong Kong), Folkestone Artworks (Kent), and Hart House at the University of Toronto. Kwan has been artist-in-residence at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (Manchester), the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). He has participated in exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (New York), ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), the MAC VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Western Front (Vancouver), and in biennials/triennials in Liverpool, Folkestone, Montreal, and Venice. Kwan is an Associate Professor in Studio Art in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, University of Toronto Scarborough and the Masters of Visual Studies Program at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto St. George.
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