Vancouver - Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh unceded territory - Friday, 21 April at 5 pm
Join artist/scholars Kayah George, Ayasha Guerin, Sandra Semchuk and Gudrun Lock for a program designed to bring participants into relationship to the wider than human.
As an Indigenous environmental leader, activist and filmmaker, Kayah George has been on the frontlines fighting against the Trans Mountain pipeline for more than half of her life. She will speak about the meaning of her new film project which explores the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the “Burrard” Inlet, and the impact campaign to come. Artist, curator and assistant professor of Black Diaspora studies, Ayasha Guerin, will share work from Liberated Planet Studio, her recent workshop series for artists and activists interested in ecological and movement research at the intersections of social and environmental justice. LPS fosters dialogue about colonialism and climate change while facilitating a local need for artists’ access to affordable studio space in Vancouver. Through her photographic, text and video works, Sandra Semchuk asks the question: what leads towards deeper recognitions across generations, cultures and species? Her work focuses on relationships between herself, her family and her community; her collaborations with the late Rock Cree writer and orator, James Nicholas, aimed to disrupt myths that shaped settler relations to First Nations. Gudrun Lock works with performance, sculpture, video, painting and collaborative, socially engaged art practices, and knows that trees, rocks and rivers are part of a living metabolism whose transformative powers endure even amidst ongoing extraction, colonialisms and unsatiated consumption.
Artists in the Anthropocene is a partnership between the Belkin and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Listening to Lhq’a:lets / Vancouver is part of a week-long artist residency organized with The Score: Performing, Listening and Decolonization UBC Research Excellence Cluster, in partnership with the UBC School of Music and Evergreen.