SESSION 15

LAIWAN with SEAGRASS, JELLYFISH and DYING STARS

&

WILL PLOWRIGHT on UNDERSTANDING INSURGENTS

Tuesday May 16, 7pm

The Foreshore

Other Sights at Access Gallery

222 East Georgia, Vancouver BC

Please join us for two short presentations followed by discussion.

In an approach to decolonization in tentacular thinking, an approach to staying with the trouble, making oddkin, and in a pitch darkness cast by the Enlightenment, LAIWAN will speak nearby with recent research navigating creative practice that is, where and what is, distinct from human exceptionalism and instrumental logic.

PLOWRIGHT will discuss his work with armed groups (some labelled ‘terrorists’), and the attempts to come to an understanding of them as human beings, rather than as monsters, criminals or deviants.

BIOS

Laiwan is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. She founded OR Gallery in 1983. Since 2000, Laiwan has been investigating embodiment through performativity, audio, music, improvisation, and varieties of media, so as to unravel and engage presence and bodily, emotional affect. Recent public commissions enable her to focus on issues of urban development, touching on poetic and philosophic themes related to current questions of environment and the built cityscape of Vancouver.

Will Plowright has 8 years of experience in conflict and disaster zones across Asia, Africa, and the Americas and focuses his doctoral research (UBC) on the use of child soldiers by non-state armed groups. Will also works with the organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), most recently in Afghanistan and the Central African Republic.

Image Credits:

Laiwan. detail Barnacle City. 2016. video. Commissioned by the City of Vancouver. Image: John Fukushima

&

Will Plowright

Audio of the event:

Part 1

Part 2