ONE DAY ONLY! 10AM–10PM
Opening Reception: March 5, 2019, 7PM

Over the past two years, grunt gallery has been at work on the project Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore focused on her remarkable performance career. This legacy project begins with an all-day screening of, March 5, 1819, and the launch of her new website, rebeccabelmore.com

In 2008 Rebecca Belmore produced the video installation March 5, 1819 recreating the abduction of the Beothuk woman Demasaduit and the murder of her husband Nonosabasut by colonialist settlers in Newfoundland. This video installation is not a historical reenactment, rather the actors are in modern dress and Belmore questions what has changed over the past 200 years. March 5, 1819, was commissioned by The Rooms in St John’s and has also been exhibited in Ottawa and Toronto. Set at Red Indian Lake in central Newfoundland March 5, 1819 was filmed in Vancouver at Mount Seymour.

March 5, 2019, marks the 200th anniversary of these events. It was announced earlier this year that their skulls will be returned to the Canadian Museum of History from the University of Scotland.  As we grapple with reconciliation it is fitting to remember the history that brought us to this place.

grunt will celebrate the re-launch rebeccabelmore.com, a website documenting Rebecca Belmore’s career over the past 32 years. The new site features content that spans Belmore’s career in all media, taking the user deep into the heart of her practice.

From July 2 – August 3, 2019, grunt gallery will also present a photographic exhibition of five new performance photographs, and a book launch of Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore, in collaboration with the Audain Art Museum and Information Office.

Funded through a New Chapter grant, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Audain Art Museum, this project celebrates the important career of one of Canada’s most iconic artists.


Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

(Image: Contras from La otra Escuela (Fan College Apparel), T-shirts, 2018, courtesy of the artist)

This new series of work by Mexican Canadian artist Carlos Colín merges symbols of Latin American conceptualist art, and Latin American colonialist history, past and present, and its diaspora. Working with archives, books, footage, and audio material related to Latin American history, the artist creates a work based on photographs, text and/or audio with parallels between, arts, politics, religion, and society.

Carlos Colín was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1980 and grew up in Mexico City. His practice explores how art can create links between Latin American societies and its diasporas by looking at how artists use local knowledge, realities, and histories in social resistance as new expressions of social and cultural progress. Colín holds a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from the National School of Fine Art in Mexico City, and a second MFA from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program at UBC where his research explores the manifestations of baroque as a colonial legacy in Latin America and its diasporas. Colín was awarded the 2016 Emerging Artist Mayor’s Arts Awards for the City of Vancouver in Visual Arts; the 2017 Artist Studio Award Program; and the Canada Council grant to the Research and Create component in 2018. His work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Gallery 1515, Vancouver; and La Boligoma Art Gallery, Mexico City.

grunt’s new Reading Room:

The Reading Room is an opportunity to discuss themes in Carlos Colín’s exhibition, Strident aesthetic. Towards a new liberation, through short theoretical, historical, or literary texts selected by Carlos Colín and Glenn Alteen. The Reading Room will take place over three Wednesday evenings: February 13, 20, and 27, 5:30PM to 7:30PM, at grunt gallery. The artist will be in attendance! Please email Nellie, nellie@grunt.ca, to register or for more information. Readings will be emailed to you in early January 2019.

Opening Reception January 10, 7 – 10 pm

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Dana Claxton. View/download here

(Image: Activist Portrait Series: Portrait of Queen Tite Opaleke, Graphite on Paper, 6 ft x 12 ft, 2015, provided by artist)

2068: Touch Change

ARTIST: Syrus Marcus Ware

CURATED BY: Vanessa Kwan

EXHIBITION: November 2 – December 15, 2018

OPENING:  November 1, 7 – 10 pm

DISCUSSION EVENT: November 2, 2018 / 7pm / grunt gallery 116-350 E. 2nd Ave

Touch Change: A conversation between Syrus Marcus Ware and !Kona

2068: Touch Change is both an archive and a speculation. Beginning 50 years in the future, this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Syrus Marcus Ware proposes an archive whose ‘holdings’ act as a meeting ground for artists and activists across time and space.

The exhibition has 3 main components: a series of large-scale graphite portraits drawn on paper and directly on the walls, a speculative text and a disseminated printed work that documents materials gathered and accessed in the artists’ research process. The portraits – in many ways the centrepiece of the exhibition – are created through a complex process of visiting and revisiting images and interviews with historic and present-day BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or People of Colour) activist communities. Ware’s investment in the archive is overlaid with a parallel interest in forms of speculative fiction (see his recent piece in C Magazine or his essay on Octavia E. Butler published by Canadian Art last year) and he speaks eloquently about how he envisions his research and installations as ways of creating a space where activists and artists of different generations are brought together:

I have been creating very large-scale portraits of activists/revolutionaries/community mobilizers as a way of celebrating activists’ culture, activists’ lives and as a way of understanding the many daily choices that we all have to get involved in big and little ways to make the world a place where we all get to have self-determination and where we all get to be free. These portraits are an act of reverence, a celebration of life and of choice and of action(s).

For my project with grunt, I explored the Trans Archives at the University of Victoria and historic archives on Salt Spring Island, digging for and finding black history in the pages and fields. In this exhibition, activists from the past present and future will meet for the first time… as I merge my archival research with interviews and portrait sittings that I did with black British Columbians while doing my residency in Victoria and Vancouver.

Ware’s work invokes the philosophy of Octavia E. Butler’s now-famous Earthseed movement from her (unfinished) Parables trilogy: “All that you touch/ you Change. All that you change/ Changes you” resonates throughout the artists work, as a reference to empathic human connection as the fuel for sustained and sustaining social justice movements. Ware, like Butler,  invites us to consider change as a constant, and hope as an ever-expanding network of relations.

A conversation with local artist and activist !Kona will take place on Friday, November 2nd at grunt gallery. This program is co-presented with Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week.

Curated by Vanessa Kwan

The exhibition is accompanied by a broadsheet featuring text by Syrus Marcus Ware. View/download here

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery,  Art Gallery of York University and The Gladstone Hotel. His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015).  He is part of the PDA (Performance Disability Art) Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza as part of Mayworks 2014. He is also a part of the Black Triangle Arts Collective (BTAC), a visual arts collective dedicated to exploring disability, racial and economic justice. He is a facilitator/designer at The Banff Centre, and for 12 years was the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program. Syrus is the inaugural Daniel’s Spectrum Artist-in-Residence (2016/17) and a core team member of Black Lives Matter-Toronto. Syrus is also part of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama. He is working on a PhD at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.

For more information visit Syrus’ personal website.

!Kona is a Vancouver-based artist, writer and activist. Her creative and social justice-oriented work has spanned arts/ cultural, queer, feminist and Black communities for over 20 years.

About Recollective Vancouver Independent Archives Week

Vancouver Independent Archives Week is a free public programming series initiated in 2015 by grunt gallery, the Western Front, and VIVO Media Arts that highlights artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practice and in/formal sites of community memory. Joined by our partners The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 221A, Artspeak, and Rungh Magazine, we have re-imagined the series as Recollective: Artists, Communities, Independent Archives, a robust expansion that examines the tensions and possibilities of the archive in narratives of social movements, activist communities, and marginalized voices.

Included in the show are works by artists Debra Sparrow (θəliχʷəlʷət), Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Hank Bull, Jovencio de la Paz, Kerri Reid, Matt Browning, Melvin Williams, and Merritt Johnson. 

(more…)

Participatory Public Performance: Bring your bicycles & your wildest butterfly costumes! Children welcome!

Date/Time: August 30, 2018

Meeting Location:  Science World at TELUS World of Science, 1455 Quebec St, Vancouver, BC V6A 3Z7
Departure: 6:15 PM from Science World
Bike Route: We will ride together at a leisurely pace along the False Creek Bike Path, with stops along the way.
Destination Point: ETA 7 PM Chain And Forge Granville Island, 1402 Anderson St, Vancouver, BC V6H 4E5 (under Granville Bridge)
Performance: ETA 7:15 – 8:30pm
*Please note that all times are estimated, and subject to variances. The total length of the bike ride is approximately 5.6 KM (30 minutes).

ARTIST: David Khang

A public performance with
 OPEN INVITATION FOR PUBLIC PARTICIPATION.
 Bring your bicycles & your wildest butterfly costumes! 
Children welcome!

How does art transform cities? How can artists activate public spaces?

How can visual imagery invigorate the public’s creativity and imagination?

For March of the Monarch, David Khang creates a new public performance from recurring tropes in his art – monarch butterflies that camouflage a military soldier and his bicycle-powered tank. The public will be invited to form a “migration” of cyclists, and participate in a butterfly-themed bicycle ride through the city, accompanying the tank along False Creek, to Granville Island. Accompanied by the Korean music troupe Tazza, and with projected visual imagery as a backdrop, the audience will be invited to help release live butterflies. This multimedia project looks to engage the audience towards a social metamorphosis as part of Khang’s ongoing work of being open to change.

The project is the last of a series of site-specific and site-responsive works produced by Khang over the past ten years as the Wrong Places Project and The Tank, The Poem and the Uniform. This multimedia project invites the audience to engage in social metamorphosis, by participating in Khang’s ongoing work of opening up to change.

Biography:

David Khang is a visual, performance, and biological artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively embeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that materialize in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang often embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions – of gender, race, and interspecies relations – that are present within dominant historic narratives in contemporary culture. By strategically employing non-native languages and code-switching, Khang produces divergent, dissonant, and often hyperbolic and humorous readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

Khang received his BSc (Psychology) and DDS (Dentistry) from the University of Toronto, BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he was the recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship. Khang concurrently completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis, for which he worked with Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, Fred Moten, and Laura Kang. In 2004, Khang’s thesis was chosen to represent UC Irvine at the Distinguished Master’s Thesis Writing Competition (USA). Khang was a 2006–07 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award (Brooklyn, NY), and in 2010, an artist– in–residence at SymbioticA Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts (Perth, Australia). Khang was born in Seoul, grew up in Toronto, and currently resides in Vancouver, where he has been dividing his time between art practice, part-time dentistry, and part-time teaching at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Khang is currently a JD candidate at Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia (2016–).

This project is made possible through Granville Island’s
Activation Grants and Initiatives.

Jeremy and Sus Borsos – The Blue Cabin Exhibition

ARTISTS: Jeremy and Sus Borsos

CURATOR: Glenn Alteen

OPENING RECEPTION: June 14, 7 – 9 PM

EXHIBITION DATES: June 15 to July 28, 2018

THE BLUE CABIN SPEAKER SERIES:

Wednesday, June 20 at 7:00 p.m.
Artist talk with Jeremy Borsos
Artist Jeremy Borsos will give a talk describing the restoration of the small 1920’s building known as the Blue Cabin. The talk will focus on possible translations of the cabin’s history.

Thursday, June 28 at 7:00 p.m.
Daniel Francis | Squat City: A Brief History of Squatting Around Burrard Inlet
Author and historian Daniel Francis will speak about the history of squatter villages on the region’s foreshore.

Saturday, July 7 at 2:00 p.m.
Carole Itter in conversation with Krista Lomax
Artist Carole Itter will present an informal talk about her artwork and writings during her 35 year-long residency at the Blue Cabin. She will be joined by artist and editor Krista Lomax.

Thursday, July 12 at 7:00 p.m.
Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, The Foreshore
Artist Jen Weih and curator and artist Vanessa Kwan will speak about The Foreshore, a project produced by Other Sights, in collaboration with Access Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery.

Thursday, July 19 at 7:00 p.m.
The Blue Cabin Project
Blue Cabin founding partners Glenn Alteen, Esther Rausenberg, and Barbara Cole will discuss the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency project.

*To keep up to date with The Blue Cabin, please sign up for a separate newsletter online here.

When Jeremy Borsos and his wife, Sus, took on the remediation of the Blue Cabin, we at grunt never expected what would eventually come out of it! Using historical materials, they took the structure apart, methodically cleaned every inch, and replaced the rotted out bits. They insulated the walls and fixed the floor. Essentially, they treated it as an archaeological site, collecting its history in scraps of newspapers and mouse nests and, in an archival process, painstakingly saved what remained. The humble structure revealed itself slowly over the six-month period of the restoration and culminated – when they took up the floor – in the discovery of almost 40 posters that had been put there in 1927 to prevent the floor from squeaking.

In this exhibition, the Borsos’ present a body of work that documents this journey, while providing us a history of the cabin before Al Neil and Carole Itter’s tenancy, and offering us new insights into the earlier inhabitants— squatters, and marine workers on the foreshore.

Jeremy Borsos attended Emily Carr School of Art and the Art Students League in New York. His practice is multidisciplinary and includes writing, photography, installation, painting, and video. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Together with his partner, Sus, the Borsos have developed a meta-historical use of salvaged architecture, constructing multiple dwellings and ancillary structures.

Sus Borsos was born in Denmark and studied statistics and computer sciences at Copenhagen University before managing Scandinavian Stage Design, where she oversaw the creation of stages for major events in Europe. After relocating to Canada in 1992, she worked with her husband, Jeremy Borsos, on constructing their Mayne Island home created from salvaged architectural fragments. Sus has also worked in digital film editing and design, and image output for reproduction.

Together, Sus and Jeremy have constructed a number of buildings using period architectural salvage. They have most recently completed a full remediation of the Blue Cabin, the studio component of a soon to be launched floating artist residency in Vancouver, Canada. Among Jeremy and Sus’s current creative projects is the redesigning and rebuilding of a studio and living space in Athens, Greece. They live and work on Mayne Island, British Columbia, and in Athens, Greece.

The Blue Cabin project is led by grunt gallery, along with Other Sights for Artists Projects, and Creative Cultural Collaborations (C3). This program has been supported by the Hamber Foundation.

Download the PDF of the catalogue and essay by Scott Watson

Exhibition: Closes April 21, 2o18, 5 PM

Reception & Book Launch with Susan Gibb, Curator & Frédérique Bergholtz, Director- If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam and artist, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

• Date/Time: April 5, 2018, 7– 9 PM
• Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

ARTIST: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

CURATOR: Susan Gibb

FACILITATED BY: Glenn Alteen

Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers is a series of six documented video performances by Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. This series of six videos on interrelated performances and were produced for the camera.

Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers was commissioned by Corpus Network and headed by, If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam, the series features the artist working solo or with an ensemble in an ethereal series of performances. These works will be featured at grunt for Capture Photography Festival and this exhibition will allow Vancouver Audiences to see the newest work by this always enthralling artist.

Artist Biography: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa lives and works in Berlin and Guatemala City. He was born in Guatemala City in 1978 and immigrated to Vancouver in the early 1980’s. In 2006 he received a BFA in Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and, in 2008, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also a postgraduate researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2013. He has had recent solo exhibitions at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; DAAD Galerie, Berlin (2017); and Gasworks, London (2015). Group exhibitions include São Paulo Biennial, Venice Biennale; LACMA, Los Angeles (2017); Lyon Biennial; and EFA Project Space, New York (2015). He has participated in performance series at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); and Tate Modern, London (2015). In recognition of his achievement, Ramírez-Figueroa was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award (2017); and a DAAD fellowship (2015-16).

This work was commissioned and produced as part of Corpus Network for performance practice. Corpus is comprised of: Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao; CAC, Vilnius; KW, Berlin; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; Playground, STUK and M – Museum Leuven; and Tate Modern, London. Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Curator Susan Gibb talks with Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s website

If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam website 

PDF of the catalogue for Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers

Opening Reception:
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 1, 2018, 7 – 9PM
Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

Artist Talk: Azadeh Emadi
Date/Time: Thursday, May 10, 2018, 6 – 7PM
Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

Lecture:
Dr Laura U. Marks & conversation with artist Azadeh Emadi:
“Creative Algorithms: From Islamic Art to Digital Media”
Date/Time: Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 7– 9 PM
Location: SFU Harbour Centre, Rm 7000

ARTIST: Azadeh Emadi

Biography:

Azadeh Emadi is a video maker and media artists who experiment with alternative approaches to image making process and technologies of perception. In applying and developing aspects of classical Persian-Islamic culture and concepts, her work aims to stimulate dialogue between Western and Middle Eastern cultures. Her videos and installations explore the intersection between reality, perception, technology and time, as an investigation for finding new ways of seeing that innovatively address some of the current socio-cultural and environmental issues. She is also a lecturer and researcher at the School of Culture and Creative Arts (Film and Television Studies Department), The University of Glasgow.

Link paper- Pixelated View: Investigating the Pixel in Light of Substantial Motion by Azadeh Emadi.

Link to Press Release

Link to Catalogue PDF_ Motion in Motion_Azadeh Emadi

“Pink noise” is a specialized frequency with a specific relationship to human biorhythms that is said to increase focus and productivity. This concept provides the aesthetic criteria and an instigator for interaction in Pink Noise Pop Up—a research project initiated by Instant Coffee that embraces colour and sound as conduits for emotional connection.

grunt gallery presents the upcoming exhibition by Instant Coffee with four Canadian artists showing in South Korea for the first time: Jeneen Frei Njootli, Krista Belle Stewart, Ron Tran and Casey Wei. Installations and performances by Korean artists will also be featured. Pink Noise Pop Up is curated by Vanessa Kwan (Curator of grunt gallery) and Inyoung Yeo (Director of Space One)

Pink Noise Pop Up will unfold simultaneously at Space One, an artist-run center, and ONE AND J. Gallery +1, a commercial space for emerging artists. Working within the context of both mainstream and alternative sites (in addition to the neighourhoods they occupy), the exhibition combines the aesthetics of consumer display with the improvisational play of social interaction.

Check back here for updates on Pink Noise Pop Up.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia.

SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE DATES:

Happening # 1: Procession through cemetery, candle lighting and Turkish tea served

• Date/Time: January 13, 2018, 2 – 5 PM
• Location: Mountain View Cemetery Celebration Hall & Courtyard

Happening #2: Turkish coffee fortune readings and traditional Turkish Tahini Helva served.

• Date/Time: January 20, 2018, 2 – 5 PM.
• Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

Happening #3: Akay family game from their great-grandmother titled, 1001 Fortunes and traditional Noah’s Pudding served.

• Date/Time: January 27, 2018, 2 – 5 PM.
• Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave.

“Our work will allow us and others to re-experience memories/emotions with late ones and create a possibility for understanding / honouring our ancestors and alive family members. We will try to create a commemoration in act and in physicality through building a shrine and creating events. We will create a place to eat, play and pray. Where we will find ways to deal with ghosts/grief of many geographies/generations dead and alive and search ways to coexist in peace and harmony.” Derya Akay, Dilara Akay

In January of 2018, grunt gallery will produce the exhibition “Ghost Spring” a two-person show by Dilara Akay and Derya Akay looking at funeral practices within their own family in Turkey, passing down information from one generation to the next. This mother and son team re-creates the rituals around death for some lives who are not considered grievable. The artists will produce an installation and a series of activations that explore ways to deal with ghosts/griefs of many geographies/generations and experience ways to coexist— focusing especially on food that is presented to, and eaten for, the dead. The works in the gallery include garlands and flowers, texts and drawings as offerings to their ancestors.

Biographies

Dilara Akay

Born in (’63) Adana,Turkey lives and works in Göcek, Turkey. Graduated Bosphorus University (’85). Founder of artist platform HAYAKA ARTI (‘05) and alternative gallery project interfacegallery.com (‘09). Recent exhibitions include “Water is Life”, Santa Fe Art Institute (‘16); “Deaf and Mute”, Kuad Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey (‘16); Mardin Biennial, Turkey (‘15). Akay is an ambassador for Terzo Paradiso, a project of Michelangelo Pistoletto & Cittadellarte.
www.dilaraakay.com

Derya Akay (b, 1988, Turkey) is an artist living in Vancouver.  He received the 2016 Portfolio Prize Emerging Artist Award in Vancouver. He has an upcoming two-person project with Dilara Akay at Grunt Gallery, Vancouver in January 2018 titled Ghost Spring and solo exhibition at Unit 17, Vancouver in May 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include with bread, Campbell River Art Gallery, 2017; Pumice, Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, California, 2017; Painting with Light, Kunstverein Toronto, 2015; Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Supper, Centre A, Vancouver, 2014. Recent group shows include The Lulennial II: A Low-Hanging Fruit, Lulu, Mexico City, 2018; Nature’s Way, Cooper Cole, Toronto, 2017; Here, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, 2017; Ambivalent Pleasures, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016. He recently completed his project Mantı, Börek, Baklava at the Burrard Marina Field House Residency program hosted by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. For this project, Akay worked with elder women with immigrant backgrounds to host a series of cooking workshops and lunches open to the public.

www.deryaakay.com

Curated by Glenn Alteen

Links:

Glenn Alteen essay on Ghost Spring [pdf]

Derya’s website here

Dilara’s website here