PHASE II: Session 3

Subterranean Weaving: On the Entwinement of Indigeneity and Hidden Labour in the Making of Contemporary Vancouver
Dana Claxton and Jaleh Manoor in conversation

Tuesday, June 5,  2018, 7 – 8.30pm
nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch, Vancouver Public Library
Wo Soon (Mary) Lee Chan Room, 730 East Hastings Street

Attendance is Free

Join celebrated local artist Dana Claxton and art historian Jaleh Mansoor as they debate the following questions, prompted by Claxton’s new series of photographic works: do unresolved aboriginal sovereignty and economics, a housing crisis precipitated by tectonic shifts in global wealth distribution and finally culture, a genre nested within lens-based practices responsive to the collapse of medium specificity, have anything to do with one another? Does the international dispersal of swelling wealth, of surplus value generated elsewhere, have anything to do with the decomposition and re-composition of a local aesthetic? Who or what stands at the vanishing point of two seemingly unrelated phenomenon that locate Vancouver on the GPS of global culture?

This event is part of The Foreshore, presented in partnership with the multi-disciplinary artist collective Other Sights for Artists’ Projects. The Foreshore hosts a series of roving discursive events held at community centres throughout the city of Vancouver, aiming to generate questions and confluence inspired by the conditions of the foreshore, the land along the edge of a body of water that is repeatedly submerged and revealed by the tide. In Vancouver, the term conjures specific histories of trade and exchange, habitation and nourishment, resistance and violent erasure. It might similarly evoke our contemporary lived situation in this city. Considering the potential of this zone as both a metaphor and physical site, year two of The Foreshore initiative pairs together returning speakers and guests of their choosing to deepen a generative and cross-disciplinary conversation around the following questions: Can there be land that is not property? How do we bring the centre to the edge? What is, as yet, unseen?

Image: Dana Claxton, ‘Subterranean Weaving: On the Entwinement of Indigeneity and Hidden Labour in the Making of Contemporary Vancouver’, 2018, (Work in progress). Courtesy the artist