Projects

The Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada is a space hosting numerous projects.

The CiCAC Residencies: Artist-Researchers who are working on the complex social and political implications of creative practice require time, space, and a nurturing environment to support their work. The CiCAC Residencies endeavour to provide Canadian and international artist-researchers with a space that operates as a think-tank, a collaborative studio, and a place to produce such work. Artist-generated and institutional funding combine to provide participants with financial support for short- and long-term residencies.
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Performing Identity/Crossing Borders: The Cyprus Symposium: 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 addressed how bodies pass between identities, across borders, and how the constraints of gendered, sexualized and racialized imperatives might be interrogated, challenged, or ... [more]

Transnational Border Shopping: Canadian Writing Across the Line: In November, 2006, three writers - Ashok Mathur, Hiromi Goto, and David Bateman - toured Taiwan universities to discuss their own creative practice in the context of contemporary national and international politics. View the pdf version of the promotional package and check the blog and site for text/audio/video updates. While their practices range from poetry to performance to fiction to interdisciplinary artistic research, these three writers share concerns about the formation of identity and how to “cross the line” to open up new ways of writing creatively. [more]

A Little Distillery in Nowgong: a novel across media: The central tenet of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary narrative that exemplifies the transformative nature of artistic production. While one of the major generative elements will be the research and writing of a novel that, like my earlier work, draws on postcolonial, diasporic, and globalization theories, integral to this project is a degree of interdisciplinarity that will further engage the reader/viewer through an interactive installation. By fully integrating multiple disciplines – specifically, writing, video, and installation – this project will be disseminated through several distinct forms ... [more]

Interior Investigations: Interior Investigations (I2I) is an artist-research initiative that brought nine artists and cultural critics to the Kamloops region for sustained periods to research and create site-specific works of writing,performance, and/or installation. The intention of I2I was to invite artists to explore the notion of the “interior,” posited as both the geographic region of B.C., but also the interiorities of race, class, and sexual identity within that space as the artist interacts with a community. The play on the title – I2I or eye-to-eye – describes the process of the artists relating to a space outside their particular locale. [more]

IntraNation: The IntraNation project is an ongoing endeavour to investigate how nations exist within nations, socially, politically, metaphorically, and creatively. Manifestions of IntraNation include a symposium in 2002 at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver; a summer-long residency bringing 60 artists and cultural critics together in Banff in 2004; and a book-length publication by West Coast Line in 2007. The IntraNation Project is a combination of research and arts events that will included the bringing together of artists, writers, and public intellectuals for a thematic residency at the Banff Centre ... [more]

Multiculturalism Issues SSHRC: This project was initiated by the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada as a one-year investigation supported by a Multiculturalism Issues Joint Initiatives grant (from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council).Canadian multiculturalism is, fundamentally, “an urban issue,” where the greatest impacts are felt in our largest cities (Sandercock 2004). Smaller cities, too, are increasingly coming to terms with questions of cultural diversity, with the need to accommodate new voices, new forms of artistic and cultural expression. Artist-researchers (those who use modes artistic inquiry to create ... [more]