The Art of Living amid the Rubble of Sedimented Histories
In partnership with UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and SFU’s David Lam Centre, this talk traces the processes of research, relation-making, and audio-visual synesthetic form involved in the durational creation of Jin-me Yoon’s Untunnelling Vision. This piece comprised of video, photography, performance, and installation brings a kaleidoscope of aesthetic experiments to bear on the sedimented histories of colonialism, militarism, and extractivism in the borderlands of Tsuut’ina Nation and the City of Calgary. It takes up the tunnel as concrete form to transform: from its modernist promise of passage from here to there to the fragmentary rubble it always leaves behind for gleaners to tend as markers of then and to reanimate as instruments of a future when.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Sasha Su-Ling Welland is Chair and Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is author of A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (2006) and Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (2018). Her writing has appeared in Journal of Visual Culture, Feminist Studies, positions: asia critique, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, among other journals and anthologies.
Respondents:
Olivia Michiko Gagnon is assistant professor of theatre & performance studies at the University of British Columbia, where she writes and teaches across performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer and feminist theory, and critical Indigenous studies. She is currently working on her first book, which theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method of doing history otherwise––though art & performance and beyond archival stricture.
Allen Baylosis is an emerging dramaturg and performance scholar. He is interested in the intersections of transnational theatre, minoritarian performances, migration, and the Filipinx diaspora. He is a Ph.D. student in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. He holds an MA in Performance Studies (New York University) and a BA in Speech Communication (UP Diliman).
Moderator:
Olivia Lim (she/her) is a graduate student completing her MA in English Literature at the University of British Columbia. Working at the intersection of critical disability studies and Asian transpacific studies, her thesis explores how understandings of disability and debility impact frameworks of redress in contemporary Asian transpacific literature. Her current and past community projects center around anti-racism education and Asian diasporic community building, most recently working with organizations like the UBC Equity & Inclusion Office, the UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) program, and the hua foundation. She is currently the Special Project Coordinator at the ACAM. Olivia is grateful to be living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations as a settler of Chinese Filipino and European ancestry.