End of Multiculturalism’ – Myth and Reality Curatorship and Community Engagement at the Crossroads The past decade has witnessed radical polarisation of opinions and public policy in the domain of multiculturalism. Radicalisation of Islam and the counter radicalisation strategies of governments, especially in the west, have informed the post 9/11 global uncertainty. While Theo Van Gogh’s murder has swung the Dutch and their neighbours into a conservative frame of mind in dealing with multiculturalism, German and British heads of governments are mooting the end of ‘state sponsored multiculturalism’. Integration is the buzz word, a platform that the immigrants have always wished for as opposed to simplistic assimilation to the establishment set of values. While the past hegemonic discourse was about the essentialist other, recent calls for a national code are posing the threat of self-essentialisation by the establishment. Amareswar Galla’s talk addresses the transformations of curatorship and community engagement in this complex environment. Critical reflections from select countries, the Netherlands and Australia included, and the dilemma for museums in complex societies in the face of a leadership crisis will be addressed. The works of select artists will be used to illustrate the talk. The Curatorial Lecture Series presents lectures on contemporary curatorial practice. It is organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Department of Anthropology, with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies; and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.

In collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, and the Faculty of Arts, the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present Barbara Fischer as part of their ongoing series of lectures on contemporary curatorial practice. Barbara Fischer is the Director/Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, University of Toronto, as well as Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art, University of Toronto. Fischer is the curator for the Canadian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009, featuring artist Mark Lewis, and is the recipient of the 2008 Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. Fischer has taken an interest in the development of Curation as a “discipline” in the academy. It is on its way to becoming a discursive field, perhaps even engendering a written history. The growing interest to move beyond personal narrative and biographical curatorial presentations gives cause to reflect on the why and the what of the profession itself. Curating tends to be driven by interesting, compelling, and urgent causes. With the immediate cost of administrative overload, attempts at narrating from outside of the discipline are often side-swiped before they begin. Fischer will situate her particular curatorial thinking within specific contexts and histories of contemporary art and from there, sketch something of a history of curating.

The Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present a talk by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “The 14th Istanbul Biennial: On Annie Besant, thought forms, mad science, love and politics,” as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series. This lecture will explore the relationship between the 14th Istanbul Biennial titled Saltwater. A Theory of Thought Forms and 19th and early 20th century theosophist Annie Besant's notion of thought forms and their impact on action and the world today, at a critical moment for Turkey and the region.

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present Notes towards Documenta 13, a talk by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series. This talk will focus on the nature and meaning of Documenta, its history and future. In the early 1950s, Documenta was conceived as a direct response to the Third Reich’s policies towards degenerate art; at the time, in Germany, only an art which celebrated the regime was allowed, while all avant-gardes were banned. Over the years, Documenta later came to signify, in the context of Western Europe, a space in which full freedom of expression could be achieved. More recently, it has been a platform for a critique of Euro-Centrism. In contrast to other periodic international exhibitions that have emerged from the world fair models of the 19th century, Documenta is therefore characterized by a strong theoretical grounding and a sense of the urgency of art in society. Documenta 13 is being developed from an archeological perspective, according to which every cultural project that moves forward must be grounded in a backward gaze, in an ecological relationship to the past. How was the present imagined in the second half of the 20th century and what was considered urgent at each successive edition of the exhibition? The Curatorial Lecture Series presents lectures on contemporary curatorial practice. The series is organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Department of Anthropology, with support from the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies, and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.

The University of British Columbia's Critical and Curatorial Studies Program, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the French Consulate in Vancouver present a talk by Catherine David, Histories of Modern Art, as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series.

The Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery is pleased to present a dynamic five-part lecture series featuring renowned international scholars and curators. The series is intended to illuminate the current challenges and critical issues that define the practice of curating in our present situation. Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 5 pm Serge Guilbaut Decolonizing Museum Eyes Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory University of British Columbia Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 5:30 pm Kitty Scott Former Curatorial Responsibilities: Collecting contemporary art at the National Gallery from 2000-2006l Director, Visual Arts and Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Banff Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 5 pm Candice Hopkins On Representation Curator, Western Front Society, Vancouver Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 5 pm Régis Michel The Crisis of the Contemporary - The New Culture Industry: Museums for Sale and Art for Tourists Conservateur en chef Musée du Louvre, Paris Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 5 pm Stéphane Martin President-Director General Musée du Quai Branly, Paris

Dieter Roelstraete’s discussion about thing theory is the result of a long-standing intellectual engagement with the question of Heideggerian “Dinglichkeit” that posits the work of art itself as the thing ‘par excellence.’ Roelstraete will consider the status of the work of art as an object and related aspects of thingness such as commodity, fetish, product, and relic. At the heart of his project lies an intuition concerning what Theodor Adorno has termed the “enigmaticalness” of the work of art, an air of mystery and opacity, of resistance to control and instrumentalization, that is closely connected to its material thingness – and it is precisely the enigma of sheer presence and Lacanian resistance that constitutes the spiritual claim of the work of art, a claim that is by its very definition, materially imbedded whether in wood or stone, sound or paint, photographic image or digital mirage.

In collaboration with Presentation House Gallery (North Vancouver), the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, and the Faculty of Arts, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to announce a panel discussion with curator Bob Nickas and artists Alan Belcher and Jennifer Bolande. Moderated by artist Gil Blank, the panel discussion is a part of the Belkin Art Gallery’s ongoing series of lectures on contemporary curatorial practice and is presented in conjunction with the exhibition photo(o)objects at Presentation House Gallery (April 10 to June 7, 2009)

Please join us at the Western Front for a panel discussion between six French curators and three local participants on the occasion of their research visit to Vancouver. Alexandra Baudelot (Co-Director, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers), Marie Cozette (Director, Centre d’art contemporain – La Synagogue de Delme), Laurence Gateau (Director, FRAC des Pays de La Loire), Marta Ponsa (Head, Department of Artistic Projects, Jeu de Paume), Claire Le Restif (Director, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry-le Crédac), and Vincent Verlé (Director, Centre d’art Bastille-Grenoble) will discuss their programs, institutions and research: Outlier Contexts and Communities (with Nigel Prince, Contemporary Art Gallery); Interstitial Spaces (with Amy Kazymerchyk, SFU Galleries Audain Gallery) and Experiential/Experimental (with Lorna Brown, artist and independent curator), with Shelly Rosenblum (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC) as the evening’s moderator. France-Vancouver: A Curatorial Conversation is hosted by the Western Front and co-presented by the Consulat Général de France, Vancouver, the Contemporary Art Gallery, SFU Galleries and the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

The University of British Columbia's Critical and Curatorial Studies Program and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery co-present a public lecture by Guillaume Désanges as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series.

The University of British Columbia's Critical and Curatorial Studies Program and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery present a talk by Jan Verwoert, Just how green, wet, close or far away? as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series.

The University of British Columbia’s Curatorial Lecture Series and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery present a talk by Jens Hoffmann, How To Do Things With Exhibitions: Art and Literature. Over the last decades, exhibitions have become vehicles for intellectual, cultural and socio-political expression. Yet, only a few have managed to successfully achieve a particular critical insight into societal concerns regarding contemporary culture. In his presentation, Hoffmann will talk about his recent trilogy of exhibitions based on three of the most iconic American novels of the last two-hundred years: The Wizard of Oz, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn (2008-2010). Hoffman will examine the relationship between literature, art and exhibition making and show how literature can provide us with a frame to understand the today’s political realities by looking at the past. The Curatorial Lecture Series presents lectures on contemporary curatorial practice. It is organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Department of Anthropology, with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies; and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.

In collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, and the Faculty of Arts, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is please to announce that Julian Myers will be participating in their ongoing series of lectures on contemporary curatorial practice. An art historian, critic, and curator, Myers will address so-called riot shows, rock concerts when the audience actively intervenes in the performance, forcing the band to end the show unexpectedly. His lecture will present audio and visual recordings of disrupted performances by bands such as Suicide, Black Sabbath, Cabaret Voltaire, Morrissey, Public Image Ltd., and Guns ‘N’ Roses. Each recording is marked by the convergence of four things: a concert of some kind, with a large audience; a part of that audience who, for one reason or another, stops that show by various means; the crucial presence of a recording device of some kind; the exchange of that recording, either as a bootleg or as an official release. Myers will elucidate how these recordings—strange, funny, boring and scary in turns—allow us to perceive the intensities and instabilities at the heart of the rock concert and, perhaps, in spectacular entertainment in general. In addition, Myers will produce a ‘zine gathering stills, transcripts, and photo-documentation of various riot shows.

The University of British Columbia’s Critical and Curatorial Studies Program in conjunction with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; the Walter Phillips Gallery; Visual Arts at The Banff Centre; and the Curatorial Practice MA Program at the California College of the Arts, present Curating in Front of a Local Backdrop a talk by Nicolaus Schafhausen, as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series. This talk will focus on the traditional European art centre. Operating before a local backdrop, these centres are internationally oriented and address a heterogeneous public often made up of tourists. Although cities are increasingly integrating them into their marketing strategies, when it comes to financing, they are being left more and more to fend for themselves. While contemporary art deals with the many challenges in politics, society, and economy in a productive and reflective way, art institutions have to face these challenges directly. This includes diminishing financial support and general changes within a city’s citizens. Art centres continue to assume that they have a relationship with the local citizenry, though none of the demographic factors seem to favour the continuance of this traditional alliance.

The University of British Columbia’s Critical and Curatorial Studies Program and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery present a talk by Pierre Bal-Blanc as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series.

This talk is a draft toward the conclusion of Linsley’s book length history of art in British Columbia. He will discuss the dialectics of regionalism in contemporary art and the failure of regional discourse in Vancouver. Linsley suggests a new critical perspective on contemporary art to explain how a valid regionalism could exist. A number of well-known contemporary Vancouver artists will be discussed and in this lecture Linsley will propose a new way to evaluate their works. Robert Linsley is an artist who lives in Kitchener, Ontario. He has recently exhibited at ACME (Los Angeles), Miguel Abreu (New York) and Diaz Contemporary (Toronto). He has written for numerous catalogues, including Frankfurt MMK, the Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennial, Vancouver Art Gallery, Belkin Art Gallery, Centre Santa Monica and FRAC Haute-Normandie. He has published criticism and art history in the Oxford Art Journal, Res, Trans E-Zine, Canadian Art, Fillip and Xtra, and has given talks at the Tate Modern, Yale, The Royal College of Art, University College London and The Whitney Museum among others. He teaches at at the University of Waterloo, in the Department of Fine Arts. The Curatorial Lecture Series is organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory; the Museum of Anthropology; and the Department of Anthropology; with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.

Bodybuilding – Howlings in favour of Klein In collaboration with the conference Breathless Days: 1959-1960, organized by the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the UBC Curatorial Lecture Series is pleased to present a talk by Régis Michel, Chief Curator at the Musée de Louvre. March 9th, 1960. A chic soirée at the Gallery d’Arquian, rue Saint Honoré, Paris. Yves Klein changes a woman into paintbrush, the public into voyeurs, and art into spectacle: a high mass of anthropometry. Nietzsche affirmed that art is never more than a (tragic) farce. Klein demonstrates that art is never more than the artist (a clown): Narcissus in seventh heaven. Klein is a flighty knave: a genius joker, for whom art is life – la vie en rose (Rrose Sélavy): a theatre of… the void. Let us build this organless body which surges up without warning, between Godard and Glauber, Vienna and Kantor, Debord and Deleuze + Guattari: a mere display of conceptual levitation … The Curatorial Lecture Series presents lectures on contemporary curatorial practice organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory; the Museum of Anthropology, and the Department of Anthropology; with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies; and the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia.

The University of British Columbia’s Critical and Curatorial Studies Program, in conjunction with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and Centre A present Fear in the Transnational Community: A Response by Artists and Curators a talk byShaheen Merali as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series. Fear in the Transnational Community: A Response by Artists and Curators will examine issues and commentators who use language specific to the arts to address a major shift in perspectives taking place in the new millennium. This shift is marked by a desire to engage with the notion of reality, which has become complex and entangled, as have all other global concepts and beliefs. The rubric “fine art” no longer refers primarily to a series of catalogued works or objects but also to a set of practices. Despite this, the language of art practice continues to express specific concepts and beliefs, which are entangled within a system where potential spectators are not necessarily included. In the new century, artists and curators are charting the efficacy of adopted methods of curation in the condensed visuality of the globe. In trying to understand these concerns, questions are raised about diminishing resources, the role of diplomacy, and the move away from the notion of an abundant Earth and toward the notion of a world in constant provocation. The talk will be concluded by an examination of Merali’s recent exhibition at the Kunsthalle Brot, Vienna, The Promise of Loss, An Index of Contemporary Iran. The Curatorial Lecture Series presents lectures on contemporary curatorial practice. It is organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Department of Anthropology, with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies; and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. This lecture is organized in collaboration with Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

The University of British Columbia’s Critical and Curatorial Studies Program and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery present a talk by Ute Meta Bauer, Scripted Spaces – The Exhibition as an Architecture of Discourse as part of the Curatorial Lecture Series. Bauer’s interests include projects outside of institutions and archival practices.