Image: Courtesy the artist
Opening Performance and Reception: Guadalupe Martinez: Sensorial Visualities: Embodying Together and Alone
Saturday, June 24 / 2-4PM
SFU Gallery
Performance: An invitation ~to breathe, touch, feel, move together
2PM
Reception to follow
Sensorial Visualities is less a formal exhibition than a proposition to learn together, differently. Drawing on her expansive multi-disciplinary, empathy-led, and haptics-focused artistic practice, Guadalupe Martinez creates an intervention on SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus that challenges inherited models of Western academia to explore ways of learning that encourage vulnerability over mastery, community over competition, and embodied presence over detached consumption. Her affective process, which includes movement workshops, listening experiments, shared readings, experimental writing, and collaborative performance—all informed by invited guests’ knowledge of somatics, esoterica, dance, sound, philosophy, and Indigeneity—opens to the public as a site for sustained dialogue and the material record of a collaborative research effort. Sensorial Visualities is the first in a series of projects that challenge presumed pedagogical frameworks and open the edges of the university classroom.
The performance An invitation ~to breathe, touch, feel, move together, involving Martinez’ students and invited members of the artist collective CUERPO, culminates weeks of focused co-learning in the gallery and at various sites on Burnaby Mountain.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Guadalupe Martinez is an artist and educator now working in Vancouver, conscious of her presence on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Peoples. Martinez makes works that reflect on art, pedagogy, and place with the hope of creating spaces of connection, care, discovery, and future dreaming. Interested in the complex relationships between history and memory, Martinez places the body at the centre of her work. Through somatic practices and collaborative actions, she looks for hidden narratives that may be foundational to individual and collective healing. She is the founding member of CUERPO Collective Body, an ongoing research process that places the body at the centre of knowing and enquires how it may exist within the very function of art production and art education.
Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Teresa Donck-Matlock