September 20–26, 2022
The SFU School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to welcome Irena Haiduk as the SCA’s 2022 Fall Audain Visual Artist in Residence. During her time in Vancouver, Haiduk will present a free public lecture on her practice, and conduct Music Has No Mercy, a workshop with SCA graduate students on the sonorous room.
Irena Haiduk directs Yugoexport, a blind and non-aligned oral corporation whose founding logic is equivalence, loyalty, and familial solidarity between people and things. Initiated as a copy of the former Yugoslav apparel and weapons manufacturer Jugoeksport, Yugoexport is formally incorporated in the United States (where corporations are people), launched in Paris, and headquartered in New York. Yugoexport transacts slowly, at the pace of their own economy. Their maxim, How To Surround Your Self With Things In The Right Way, is the core principle powering the production of images, books, apparel, orations, films, scenographies, and variable spaces, all designed to nourish the organ of imagination.
Current political systems apply their aggression against multitudes by chiefly economic means. Economic infrastructure underpins all materials, labor, and products of artistic making. These infrastructures leave clear aesthetic marks. The grip of this force configures our lives, gives them their look and feel. To work in a field rooted in making desires, to make art today, is to share the responsibility for what aesthetic economies maintain. Desires, many of them powered by art, brought us here. How can we seduce and desire differently? There are many ways to start. To take part in Yugoexport’s economies, read on, visit any of their works, or transact with them, go to yugoexport.com.
About the Audain Visual Artist in Residence
The Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR) 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. Past residences have included Jackson Polys, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Heba Y. Amin, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Jeremy Deller, Sanja Iveković, Charles Gaines, Samson Young, Alejandro Cesarco, Raven Chacon, Sarah Pierce, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Hito Steyerl, and many others. The visiting artists interact with the students and faculty of the School for the Contemporary Arts as well as the broader visual arts and cultural communities. In keeping with the experimental nature of the School for the Contemporary Arts the terms of engagement are open and change from artist to artist. The cornerstone of the residency is the sharing of artistic research.
The AVAIR program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.
The artist talk with Irena Haiduk is presented in collaboration with SFU Galleries, and will take place on September 21 at 6pm in the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver.
