Feminist Land Art Retreat, No Man's Land (production still), 2018. Image courtesy the artist.
Retreat: No Person's Land
Sunday, June 24, 10AM - 5PM
SFU Gallery
No Person's Land uses collaborative research to enact how alternative structures might be formed between peers based on shared commitments and support, mapping a terrain between practice, thinking and being. In this one-day retreat, participants will work with listening, reading and writing methodologies to explore shared desires for the Otherwise, a concept that encompasses the possibility for social, political and institutional relations to take new forms through collective imagining. Derya Akay, Simranpreet Anand, Roxanne Charles, Tarah Hogue, Vanessa Kwan, Steffanie Ling, Pablo de Ocampo, cheyanne turions, and Kurtis Wilson will facilitate the retreat's program, which will take place in SFU Gallery and outside on SFU's Burnaby Campus.
The retreat is open to the public, though capacity is limited and registration is required. Participants are asked to commit to attending the entire program. Lunch will be provided. Email akazymer@sfu.ca to register.
No Person's Land will expand upon values regarding sentience, sovereignty and mutual dependence that Feminist Land Art Retreat's exhibition Free Rein expresses. No Person's Land was initiated by Amanprit Sandhu and cheyanne turions through DAM Projects in London, UK. This iteration is programmed by cheyanne turions.
Schedule
10AM / Welcome: cheyanne turions will introduce No Person's Land and the Otherwise.
11AM / Listening: Pablo de Ocampo will facilitate a listening session of songs that embody non-romantic desire within friendship, collaborative organizing and cultural production.
12PM / Lunch: Derya Akay and Kurtis Wilson will prepare lunch and invite participants to consider critical approaches to food production, preparation and dissemination.
1PM / Reading Groups: Simranpreet Anand, Tarah Hogue and Vanessa Kwan will facilitate readings on polyamory as forms of non-normative relational networks; inhabiting the "back alleys" of gender as a strategy for cultivating unique relational structures; the productive and exhaustive tensions of being "difficult" within contemporary art; and reorienting the intersections of art, history, land and bodies.
2PM / Collaborative Discussion: cheyanne turions will facilitate a conversation that weaves together the different readings.
3PM / Writing: Steffanie Ling will lead a writing workshop that draws upon Evan Calder Williams's Roman Letters to propose the epistolary form as a method of orienting ourselves within our present material conditions.
4PM / Walking: Moving to the Burnaby 200 Soccer Field, Roxanne Charles will introduce us to the Kwekwecnewtxw Watch House. Coast Salish water protectors, guided by Tsleil-Waututh communities, are leading the opposition to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion that is proposed to run through Burnaby Mountain.
Facilitators
Derya Akay and Kurtis Wilson are interdisciplinary artists who collaborate on self-sufficient and sustainable food and hospitality projects. They have recently started a project that encompasses a self-built kitchen, community cultivated garden, network of collaborators with knowledge and experience in a range of agricultural and culinary traditions, and social dinners at Unit 17.
Simranpreet Anand is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intercultural nuances and experiences which define systemic racism and its characterization of parallel colonial histories through misunderstanding, failure, humour, boundaries, and language. She has worked on community engagement and education projects with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Burrard Arts Foundation, the Hatch Art Gallery, and the Surrey Art Gallery.
Roxanne Charles is a mixed media artist and contemporary storyteller. She is of Strait Salish and European descent, and an active member of Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey. Charles has recently co-curated Ground Signals at the Surrey Art Gallery with Jordan Strom, and her work was exhibited in Intangible: Memory and Innovation in Coast Salish Art at the Bill Reid Gallery.
Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer, whose work engages collaborative methodolgoies and a careful attentiveness to place in order to decentre colonial modes of perception within institutional spaces. She is the inaugural Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist, writer and curator. Her practice involves the production of work in public space, and is often collaborative, site-specific and interdisciplinary. She currently works as Curator of Community Engagement with grunt gallery and as Producer/Curator with Other Sights for Artists' Projects.
Steffanie Ling is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments, and diatribes. She is currently Events and Exhibitions Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre.
Pablo de Ocampo is the Exhibitions Curator at Western Front. Previously, he was the Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, Ontario and was a founding member of the collectively run screening series Cinema Project in Portland, Oregon.
cheyanne turions is a curator, cultural worker and writer of settler and Indigenous ancestry from the farmlands of Treaty 8. Her work positions exhibitions and criticism as social gestures, where she responds to artistic practices by linking aesthetics and politics through discourse. turions is currently the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Supported by Canada Council for the Arts and British Columbia Arts Council.
