Image credit: Gracy Gandhi and Sana Goel
BFA Project 2024: ONE END TO ANOTHER
Emma Campbell, Shirley Chen, Caroline Chernega, Amy Dai, Luvz de Guzman, Abroop Dhami, Gracy Singh Gandhi, Sana Goel, Ocean Hongphankul, Julian Injeti, Lily Le, Delicia Liu, Daniel Molnar, Harvir Nahal, Harmon Nakajima, Sarah Robinson, Renan Shao, and Annie Yu.
MARCH 28 – APRIL 6, 2024
Audain Gallery
One End to Another is an exhibition by SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts' third-year Visual Art students. The exhibition is conceived in companionship with the work of Iman Issa, the Spring 2023 Audain Visual Artist in Residence. For her residency, Issa will lead a series of seminars, talks, workshops, and other interventions in and around the BFA Project Exhibition.
The exhibition includes recent works by the third-year cohort. Many of the works reflect on questions about the self-in-the-world, interpersonal and interspecies connectivity, belief systems, identity, and abstraction.
The third-year visual art students—in addition to producing their own works—have been considering the practice of exhibition making itself. In particular, the students looked at the exhibition Understudies: I Myself Will Exhibit Nothing, curated by Iman Issa at KW Berlin, in 2022. They are motivated by Issa’s gathering of companion artworks which begin from a personal, or idiosyncratic, logic to manifest an exhibition that intertwines personal, social, and geo-political histories across surprising aesthetic relations.
In addition to the artworks, the third-year cohort has chosen two types of “companions” to exhibit. Each artist contributed to a collection of objects of interest and a collection of reference artworks. These collections exist parallel to the artworks, allowing us to experiment with questions about display and the differing status of cultural versus art objects. Together, the students’ artworks, the reference images, and the collection of objects, form a companionship not necessarily based on an easy similarity but rather on a search for resonance.
Biography
Iman Issa is an artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Solo and group exhibitions include Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MoMA, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21er Haus, Vienna, MACBA, Barcelona, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, the Whitney Biennial 2019, the 12th Sharjah biennial, the 8th Berlin Biennial, MuHKA, Antwerp, Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, New Museum, New York, and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Books include Book of Facts: A Proposition (2017), Common Elements (2015) and Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011). She has been named a 2017 DAAD artist in residence, and is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), HNF-MACBA Award (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013).
About AVAIR
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 Ming Wong, Kota Ezawa, Irena Haiduk, 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.
This exhibition takes place on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU in partnership with SFU Galleries
Events
BFA Project 2024 Exhibition Opening
Wednesday, March 27 / 6 – 8 PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Artist Talk: Iman Issa
Thursday, March 28 / 7 PM (door 6:30 PM)
Studio T (Room 2210), 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Talk by Dr. Marcella Lista + Student led tour
Thursday, April 4 / 930 AM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Marcella Lista is the Head Curator of the New Media Collection at Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris. Via Zoom, Lista will discuss the milestone exhibition Les Immatériaux, curated by philosopher Jean François Lyotard and Theirry Chaput at Centre Pomidou in 1985.
The talk by Dr. Lista will be followed by a student-led tour of the exhibition in the Audain Gallery.
