SESSION 12
ERIC FREDERICKSEN: DEDICATED TO YOU, BUT YOU WEREN’T LISTENING
&
DR. CISSIE FU on THE POLITICAL & AESTHETIC POTENTIALS OF BODIES IN PUBLIC SPACES
Tuesday April 4, 7pm
The Foreshore
Other Sights at Access Gallery
222 East Georgia, Vancouver BC
Two short presentations followed by discussion.
FREDERICKSEN will discuss his interest in how art becomes public, and how sites become specific, through anonymous or publicized interventions, vandalism, parody, and time.
FU will approach questions of political art in public space along three vectors–the aesthetics of taking a stance, the politics in social choreographies, and protest as an artistic gesture–towards teasing out the tensions between presentation and representation, while attending to the resonances between community and commutiny, in the 21st century.
BIOS
Dr. Cissie Fu is Dean of the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and Co-Founder of the Political Arts Initiative, which invites 21st-century imag-e-nations of the political through digital technology and the creative and performing arts. Cissie’s research sits at the nexus of politics, philosophy, and performance, with a focus on contemporary manifestations of the political through individual and collective action and expression. Suspending divisions of theory/practice, contemplation/action, and analysis/performance, Cissie seeks common ground where thinking, making, and acting are equally foundational to being human, which, when taken as the starting point of political theorising, casts performance—of identity, will, and responsibility—as a powerful source for political awakening and a robust realisation of citizenship.
Eric Fredericksen is a curator and writer in Vancouver and Seattle. He is the Public Art Program Manager for the City of Vancouver. Formerly the director of Western Bridge, Seattle, he has organized exhibitions at the Or Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, and the Bodgers and Kludgers Co-operative Art Parlour, Vancouver; the International Chilliwack Biennial, Cultus Lake Provincial Park, BC; What-the-Heck Fest, Anacortes, Wash.; Open Satellite, Bellevue, Wash.;and Limoncello, London. He has written catalog essays for Hadley+Maxwell, Heather and Ivan Morison, and Philippe van Wolputte, and has taught at the Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, and the University of Washington, Seattle.
Image credits:
Jeremy Hunka, Global News, Vancouver BC, 2014
“Yellow Umbrella Man Group – Part 2”, K of Hong Kong Thru My Eyes, 7 November 2014.
Audio recording of the event: