Events and Announcements
Upcoming CiCAC events
Limber: body performance gender: March 1-5, 2010
in the first week of march, 2010, the centre for innovation in culture and the arts in canada (cicac) hosts five emerging artists, all posing questions that push the limits of the body in very different contexts. these artists will be researching new work and interacting with students and faculty as well as presenting in panels and performance. watch for information on events and actitivites.
Sepideh Saii is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video and installation. She has coordinated cultural events and visual arts exhibitions, as well as taught introductory and advanced courses in video production at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Recently she completed her M.A. in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London. My project will examine the nostalgic feeling that movies evoke through ‘goodbye scenes’. By projecting selected scenes onto a wall and mimicking the actor’s gestures through live performance (by waving my arms and/or looking back at the image) I hope to reflect the viewer’s desire to hang on to an image and/or continue the narrative. The film image and my performance will be recorded as two separate video images that will be projected onto two separate walls as an installation.
Mere Phantoms are a Montreal based creative studio specializing in live visuals and projection design. In 2008 Maya Ersan, a ceramicist, animator and puppeteer from Istanbul, Turkey joined forces with Jenny San Martin; a printmaker, animator and Flash developer from Toronto to collaborate on art projects using projection. Their projects attempt to bridge physical and the virtual realms of experience by embracing practices that range from perfomance, animation and puppetry to web-based interfaces. In 2009, Mere Phantoms are introducing Living Wallpapers; beautifully animated patterns and collages created specifically for wall decoration using digital projection technology. Unlike performative projections, Living Wallpapers are made for the intimate experience within the domestic and everyday spaces. As such these projections are more to be “lived with” rather than being looked at , or watched.
Simla Civelek (b. 1974, Istanbul) is a performance artist and poet. She studied at The School of Physical Theatre and The George Brown Theatre School. Her recent work has been presented at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto, and Open International Performance Art Festival in Beijing, China. She lives and works in Toronto. Her "black box" and the after-performance takes inspiration from a religious and a cultural form of Islamic headdress called “niqab” Civelek will build a small wooden box and cover it with black fabric, leaving only a slot open for the eyes. She will be in the box for 12 hours. Participants will be invited to come in and choose from a series of interactions. At the end of 12 hours, she will come out of the box and present a short performance. This after-performance will be the result of artist’s research and work during her residency at CICAC.
Ikbal Singh: As an interdisciplinary artist my work has taken on many forms, from sculptural to installation and from ceramic to performance. I delve into ways of interacting with the public and examine the many roles a viewer can take on depending on their comfort level and challenging that level. My more recent work has led me to continue my experiential research around social behaviour while still concentrating on internal struggles of association, assimilation, or acceptability. The residency project is around "Giddha," a folk dance Punjabi women usually perform at celebrations, specifically at weddings. It's performed in a circle with one woman starting a satirical verse poking fun at life. At the chorus the other women join in clapping and dancing. I'd like to spend my week at CICAC working on deciphering the giddha songs I recorded at relative's wedding and developing an action piece around the dance steps.
Archived CiCAC events
Sept. 12, 2007: Bennett Fu presentation
Dr. Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He specializes in Canadian Literature and Asian North American Studies and his research and publications are in the areas of gender, sexuality, and literature.
2:30 pm, Wed, Sept. 12, AE108, TRU (Kamloops)
Bennett Fu, “Where is her(e)” presentation
4:30 pm, Wed, Sept 12, OM1487, TRU (Kamloops)
Reception, Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in
Canada (CiCAC)
8 pm, Thurs, Sept 13, 1168 W 7th Avenue (Vancouver)
Reception (Vancouver, sponsored by CiCAC)
2 pm, Fri, Sept 14, UBC (Vancouver)
Bennett Fu, “Where is her(e)” presentation
Poetry Book Launch
CiCAC presents "Double Wow," launches for new poetry books by David Bateman and Jacqueline Turner.7 pm, Friday, March 30 @ Players (357 Victoria St, Kamloops). Free admission, everyone welcome. Bonus: new broadsheet publications by the poets wil be released at this special event.
Call for Presentations (closed): Performing Identity/Crossing Borders
Abstracts due: Dec. 15, 2006
Presentation Venue: Nicosia, Cyprus, May 3-6, 2007
…the breakdown of the belief systems or frameworks of meaning that formed the foundation of cultural coherence and continuity until World War Two has provided a breakthrough for artists who have been marginalized by the hegemonous thinking of white patriarchy.— Robert Wallace, Producing Marginality 141
As national borders become more porous and more restrictive,
identity politics and the body — in all its manifestations
— have once again become a critical concern. As the body
crosses borders between nations and identities, corporeality
is interpellated, fictionalized, reconfigured, and detained
within a socially sanctioned construction of security and necessity.
This performance symposium will address how bodies pass between
identities, across borders, and how the constraints of gendered,
sexualized and racialized imperatives might be interrogated,
challenged, or inverted. As Judith Butler states, certain forms
of identity “might at once be produced as a troubling
return, not only as an imaginary contestation that effects the
failure in the workings of the inevitable law, but as an enabling
disruption, the occasion for a radical rearticulation of the
symbolic horizon in which bodies come to matter at all”
(Bodies That Matter 23).
Participants in the symposium are asked to address how notions
of identity are inscribed or erased as questions of citizenship
are reconsidered through the lenses of racialization, class
movement, sexual identity, and gendered/transgendered realities.
Performing Identity/Crossing Borders will be a symposium blending
critical performances and performance criticism. Papers or presentations
will address citizenship, racialization, gender and sexuality
in the context of borders and performance. Interdisciplinary
and performative critiques are welcome.
The site of the event will be Nicosia, Cyprus, emphasizing the
nature of a state divided and how that effects the bodies that
pass by, over, and through spaces such as the ‘dead zone’
in disparate political spheres.
Submit abstracts of 250 words to co-convenors David Bateman
and Ashok Mathur by Dec. 15, 2006. The Centre for Innovation
in Culture and the Arts in Canada, conference sponsor, will
provide invitational letters of support to assist successful
applicants seeking travel grants from their home or other arts
institutions.
The Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada
Ashok Mathur: amathur@tru.ca
David Bateman: godsavethedragqueen@yahoo.com
Download Performing Identity/Crossing
Borders Call for Papers as a Word document
Download "Performance
Art as Cultural Effacement" background paper
In the loop Reading Series: Larissa Lai (Wednesday September 20/2006)
Born in La Jolla, California, she grew up in Saint John's,
Newfoundland and Labrador. She attended the University of British
Columbia and, in 1990, graduated with a B.A. in Sociology. Subsequently,
she earned her MA from the University of East Anglia. Her first
novel, When Fox is a Thousand (1995) was shortlised for the
1996 Books in Canada First Novel Award, and her second, salt
fish girl was published in 2002. From 1997 to 1998 she was the
Markin-Flanagan Canadian writer-in-residence at the University
of Calgary, and she held a similar position as writer-in-residence
at Simon Fraser University in 2006. She completed her PhD at
Calgary in July 2006, and has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship
at UBC. Lai has been announced as one of the instructors at
the 2007 Clarion West science fiction and fantasy writer's workshop.
[event poster]
[audio transcription]
In the loop Reading Series: Roy Miki (Wednesday September 20/2006)
Roy Akira Miki is a poet, editor, and educator. A third-generation
Japanese-Canadian, he was educated at the University of Manitoba,
the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University,
where he now teaches. He is active in the National Association
of Japanese-Canadians, an organization that successfully negotiated
with the federal government the Redress Agreement of 1988 for
injustices suffered during the Second World War. Miki's book
Justice in Our Time: The Japanese-Canadian Redress Settlement
(1991, in collaboration with Cassandra Kobayashi) documents
the enforced internment of Japanese-Canadians during and after
the war and the subsequent struggle for redress. In Saving Face:
Poems Selected, 1976-1988 (1991), these concerns are again foremost;
the book sensitively portrays "the whole web / of intricate
family ties" of an uprooted generation and outlines the activities
of the redress movement. Miki has also written a critical study,
The Prepoetics of William Carlos Williams (1983), and an annotated
bibliography of George BOWERING (1990). He edited a book on
bp NICHOL entitled Tracing the Paths (1988), and has also edited
This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese-Canadians,
1941-1948 by Muriel Kitagawa (1985) and Pacific Windows: The
Collected Poems of Roy Kiyooka (1997). His most recent book
of poems, Random Access File, was published in 1995. In Broken
Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing (1998), a collection of
essays, Miki explores the interrelation of home, race, poetry,
and internment in the formation of his identity as a writer.
[event poster]
[audio transcription]