Irena Haiduk

The SFU School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to welcome Irena Haiduk as the SCA’s 2022 Fall Audain Visual Artist in Residence. During her time in Vancouver, Haiduk will present a free public lecture on her practice. She will conduct Music Has No Mercy, a workshop with graduate students on the sonorous room.

Irena Haiduk directs Yugoexport, a blind and non-aligned oral corporation whose founding logic is equivalence, loyalty, and familial solidarity between people and things. Initiated as a copy of the former Yugoslav apparel and weapons manufacturer Jugoeksport, Yugoexport is formally incorporated in the United States (where corporations are people), launched in Paris, and headquartered in New York. Yugoexport transacts slowly, at the pace of their own economy. Their maxim, How To Surround Your Self With Things In The Right Way, is the core principle powering the production of images, books, apparel, orations, films, scenographies, and variable spaces, all designed to nourish the organ of imagination.

Current political systems apply their aggression against multitudes by chiefly economic means. Economic infrastructure underpins all materials, labor, and products of artistic making. These infrastructures leave clear aesthetic marks. The grip of this force configures our lives, gives them their look and feel. To work in a field rooted in making desires, to make art today, is to share the responsibility for what aesthetic economies maintain. Desires, many of them powered by art, brought us here. How can we seduce and desire differently? There are many ways to start. To take part in Yugoexport’s economies, read on, visit any of their works, or transact with them, go to yugoexport.com

About the Audain Visual Artist in Residence


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 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.

EVENTS

Artist Talk: Irena Haiduk

September 21, 6:00 PM | FREE

Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

Irena Haiduk’s artist talk is presented in collaboration with SFU Galleries.  

Workshop: Music Has No Mercy
Friday, September 23, 2022 | 2:00 PM
Visual Art Studios – 611 Alexander Street, Vancouver

For participating SCA Graduate students only.

You can shut your eyes, cover your skin, plug your nose and ears, retract your tongue. Most senses can be shut out but vibration can't be denied. This is probably why bombs are so cruel. If you are not already under a building you are imbibing the destruction of everything around you, your home, through vibration, as  it radiates from those shielding their eyes from the blast all the way to the far away lands where it arrives as a barely noticeable shiver. This fact sediments into all bodies and corrodes them. All life understands.

There are many ways to the sonorous room. To vibrate without corroding, to move, to emit outward, a bat of an eyelash, a press, a handle. Bring your spells, your sounds, instruments and stories and we will record a music night together, just for us.

Participants are to bring their recordings, stories, voices, instruments, handclaps, sounds in order to share them over the course of the afternoon. There will be several recording areas set up and we will work together to make a mixtape. It will be an afternoon of listening and recording.

To register please email Kathy Slade kslade@sfu.ca to receive links to recordings and readings