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Franny, digital print on fabric, 2007/2018 |
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Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT |
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Celebrating the excessive abundance of the archive, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is concerned with language, depictions of the woman reader as an artistic genre and the potential of reading as performed resistance. Central to the exhibition, Rereading Room is a reconstruction of the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore (1973-1996) in the second iteration of a project by Alexandra Bischoff. Thirteen artists, writers, theorists and researchers have been invited to occupy the installation as The Readersfor the duration of the exhibition, working with and against the inventory by reading, annotating and supplementing the collection to form a dossier of responses. A textile multiple by Kathy Slade will wrap and adorn The Readers and lingering visitors. Lisa Robertson finds in Baudelaire’s dandy a tangible presence for old women in public spaces. A multitude of artworks dating from 1968 to 2017 explore language as a medium and material, including works by Allyson Clay, Judith Copithorne, Gathie Falk, Jamelie Hassan, Germaine Koh, Laiwan, Sara Leydon, Divya Mehra, Adrian Piper, Kristina Lee Podesva, Anne Ramsden, Evelyn Roth and Elizabeth Zvonar, among others that are drawn from the Belkin Art Gallery collection, the Kamloops Art Gallery, SFU Galleries, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is the first of four exhibitions based upon the Belkin Art Gallery’s research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds – feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing – began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture. Noting the resurgence of art practice involved with social activism and an increasing interest in the 1970s from younger producers, the Belkin has connected with diverse archives and activist networks to bring forward these histories, to commission new works of art and writing and to provide a space for discussion and debate. Curated by Lorna Brown |
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Alexandra Bischoff |
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