Adad Hannah with The Circle Project, What Fools These Mortals Be (video still), 2022. Courtesy the artist.
Adad Hannah with The Circle Project: What Fools These Mortals Be
September 15 – 20, 2022, 12 – 5PM
Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street
Launch and Keynote: Thursday, September 15, 6PM
Registration required
The Circle Project was created in 2019 by filmmaker Brenda Longfellow and restorative justice advocate Brenda Morrison as an evolving collaboration of artists and formerly incarcerated women dedicated to producing provocative art together. Inspired by Indigenous modalities of community based justice, The Circle Project is committed to imagining alternatives to the violence and dehumanization of carceral systems and logics. Broadly accessible online and disseminated through multiple platforms, The Circle Project’s art projects use imagination, storytelling, performance and play to generate rich and intimate encounters with the complex and layered experience of women who are reclaiming their lives on the outside.
A collaboration between artist Adad Hannah, The Circle Project, and 14 formerly incarcerated women, What Fools These Mortals Be reimagines Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a series of stunning tableaux vivantes, experienced as an immersive video installation.
What Fools These Mortals Be launches with a keynote by distinguished activists and scholars Angela Davis and Gina Dent at 6:00 pm September 15, 2022, and may be viewed in the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts through September 20, 2022.
The Circle Project is produced on unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaɬ and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm Nations.
What Fools These Mortals Be is generously supported by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; The Department of Cinema and Media Arts, York University; The Centre for Restorative Justice, Simon Fraser University; and produced in partnership with SFU Galleries.
For more information on The Circle Project and What Fools These Mortals Be please visit their website.
Adad Hannah creates artworks in installation, video, and photography, often in collaboration with a community of people. Much of his work draws upon the history of early photography and cinema to reimagine the art historical canon. Attuned to our experience of time, Hannah’s works also invite audiences to place themselves within a given moment of history.
Hannah was born in New York in 1971 and has called Vancouver home for many years. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and an MFA and a PhD from Concordia University. His work has been recently exhibited across Canada and internationally with exhibitions in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Kitchener, Toronto, Montreal, St. Johns, Paris, Marseille, Seoul, Basel, Porto Allegre, Dakar, Lagos, San Antonio, Melbourne, Bucharest, and many others.
His work is represented in public collections globally, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée Rodin (Paris), Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), LEEUM Museum (Seoul), Monash University (Melbourne).
He has won a number of awards, including the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding mid-career artists in 2009. Hannah is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal and Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.