MFA Fall Festival
September 9 – 25, 2021 | SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts | FREE
Note: Following BC health guidelines, proof of first COVID-19 vaccine dose will be required for entry to any performance on or after Sep 13.
Coinciding with the return to classes and our emergence from 18 months of pandemic-related isolation, the MFA Fall Festival showcases the work of graduating MFA candidates in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
In the exhibition Trajectories of Unlooking, on view in the Audain Gallery, artists Karla Desentis Rodríguez, Aakansha Ghosh, somayeh khakshoor, and Faune Ybarra position their work aslant fixed geographies and viewpoints. Exploring different relational understandings of place, individuality, and identity, they translate these threshold perspectives into living documents — books, photography, video, installation, performance — that materialize the ideas of perception, legibility, and repetition reflected in their respective journeys.
In the sound expo hyperlocal \ sono-niche, Rahul Bader, Charlie Cooper, and C. Olivia Valenza also grapple with themes of embodiment, place, community, and identity, asking: What is the capacity of sound to reach deeply to what calls our bodies to action? Through intimate performances occupying unique spaces in SFU's Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, these artists produce sonic experiences that will have participants travelling with embodied geographies, exploring a sounding body, and listening to the liminal in new imagined ecosystems.
The festival also features two works of digital performance. Giselle Liu’s Our Eyes Will Adjust is a work of dance on film, the culmination of a larger iterative exploration of embodied ways of seeing that also encompassed immersive performance and installation. Finally, Kourosh Ghamsari-Esfahani’s Birth of a Leaf is a video-collage of multiple short violin solos and accompanying gestural improvisations, the quivering bow attached to a quivering body in search of new frames of playing and becoming.
The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
Presented with support from SFU Advancement & Alumni Engagement.
The School for the Contemporary Arts recognizes that we are on the unceded and occupied territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
