Presented by the Audain Visual Artist in Residence program at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
September 9–December 8, 2020
The Audain Visual Artist in Residence program (AVAIR) and the School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA) at Simon Fraser University are pleased to announce the Fall 2020 Visual Art Forum, a term-long series of free online public lectures by a diverse group of leading contemporary artists and thinkers from Canada, UK, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Visual Art Forum is presented as part of the SCA’s AVAIR program and forms a central element of our studio and seminar classes.
Pablo José Ramirez, Jeremy Deller, Sandra Brewster, Irena Haiduk, Sanja Iveković, Charles Gaines, Samson Young, and Tanya Lukin Linklater
Please visit our website for up to date scheduling and information about how to register to receive Zoom invitation links to the public lectures.
About the Visual Art Forum speakers:
Pablo José Ramírez is a curator, art writer and cultural theorist. He is Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. His work revisits post-colonial societies to consider non-western ontologies, indigeneity, forms of racial occlusion, and sound. In 2015 he co-curated the 19th Bienal Paiz: Transvisible in Guatemala. He was a Guest Curator at Parsons/The New School in New York and at the CCA in Glasgow. Ramirez was the recipient of the 2019 Independent Curators International/CPPC Award for Central America and the Caribbean. He is the Editor and co-founder of Infrasonica.
Jeremy Deller is an English conceptual artist who is best known for large-scale collaborative works such as Battle of Orgreave (2001), a reenactment of a violent confrontation that occurred during the UK miners’ strike in 1984, and for 2016’s We’re Here Because We’re Here. He won the Turner Prize in 2004, and in 2010 was awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA).
Sandra Brewster is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. A recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize (2018) and the Gattuso Prize for Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (2017), Brewster has been recognized for her community-based practice that centres a Black presence located in Canada.
Irena Haiduk does not provide a biography for public consumption.
Sanja Iveković is a Croatian photographer, performer, sculptor, and installation artist. Her groundbreaking work addresses such issues as female identity, media, consumerism, and political strife. Her artistic career began during the Croatian Spring in the early 1970s when, together with other artists, she broke away from mainstream practices to become a pioneer of video, conceptual photomontages, and performance. She was the first artist in Croatia to label herself a feminist artist, and has been a central figure at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb since it opened in 1994.
Charles Gaines is a pivotal figure in the field of Conceptual Art. His body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the CalArts School of Art faculty.
Samson Young is a composer and sound and media artist based in Hong Kong. His work touches upon topics such as military conflict, identity, migration, and political frontiers past and present. Sound and its cultural politics are at the heart of a practice that interlays multiple narratives and references. He represented Hong Kong in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances in museums, videos, and installations centre on knowledge production in and through orality and embodied practices, including dance. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence. While her Alutiiq homelands are in southern Alaska (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions), she has lived and worked in Nbisiing Anishnabek territory in northern Ontario for more than a decade.
The Visual Art Forum is organized by Kathy Slade in collaboration with SCA Visual Art faculty Sabine Bitter, Raymond Boisjoly, Elspeth Pratt, and Judy Radul.
The Audain Visual Artist in Residence program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. The visiting artists interact with the students and faculty of the SCA as well as the broader visual arts and cultural communities. The program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.
The School for the Contemporary Arts recognizes that we are on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
