Artist Talk | Noor Bhangu & Durrah Alsaif
Group Exhibition
Areez Katki, Christina Battle, Durrah Alsaif, Elisabeth Belliveau, Emmanuel Osahor
January 24 – March 14, 2020
Solo Exhibition in the Garage
Lauren Crazybull
January 24 – April 4, 2020
Join us on Friday, January 24 at 6pm for a conversation between Noor Bhangu and Durrah Alsaif, followed by a reception for members & guests from 7-10pm for Noor Bhangu’s new curatorial project, even the birds are walking.
even the birds are walking is a curatorial project that seeks to smooth out the wrinkles of historical and contemporary utopias through inquiry, dialogue, and process. The two exhibitions will center artists that stretch inherited social visions by accommodating cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and interspecial encounters that have the potential to move us to a more inclusive elsewhere, beyond the here and now of environmental and sociopolitical disasters.
It is no coincidence that utopia and desire are hard to define, let alone materialize in the present. In these exhibitions, this theoretical failure emerges in and through the work of artists that question our search for utopia in dialogue with other species. Together, we ask: When the birds take to the pavement, how can we justify our own flight? In its exhibitionary arrest of utopia, even the birds are walking will build an urgency around social movements and attempt to map out a critical groundwork for our future flights.
Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories and strategies of presentation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. Her curatorial practice includes projects: Overlapping Violent Histories: A Curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge (2018), womenofcolour@soagallery (2018), Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art (2018), Lines of Difference: The Art of Translating Islam (2019) and Digitalia (2019). In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.
Durrah Alsaif is an interdisciplinary artist, who received her B.F.A. in 2017 from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She recently got shortlisted for the Figureworks 2019 Award and was part of the Figureworks exhibition in Ottawa. Alsaif had a public artwork in Stadium/Chinatown Skytrain station in Vancouver, BC for her work Qimash as part of the Capture Photography Festival in collaboration with TransLink. She has exhibited at galleries such as the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, where she was selected as runner-up for the 2nd annual Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize in 2017, and the Surrey Art Gallery, where she was awarded the Second Place 3D Works & Fibre Arts Award in 2018. Originally from Saudi Arabia but now living in Canada, Alsaif is interested in exploring the ever-changing and malleable conditions based on cultural and socio-political notions in her home country via the lens of a person living in North America. She explores these ideas with photography, performance, sculpture, and installation.