Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary artist working in performance and media arts. She was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018), a Lucas Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design, Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2020), and the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award (2023). Hupfield is a Guest Curator for the Artists of Color Council, Movement Research at Judson Church, Winter 2020, and an inaugural resident of the Surf Point Foundation Residency 2020. Her solo Nine Years Towards The Sun at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, (2019) focuses on exhibiting performance as living culture and follows her first major institutional solo exhibition in Canada, The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her work has shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016) and traveled nationally with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14); with recent performances at the National Gallery of Canada. Hupfield is an off-rez citizen of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Anishinaabe Nation, and the Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto.
Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist and curator. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped, by Tahltan epistemological production and often takes the form of performance interventions. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievements by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, New Zealand, and Greenland, as well as across Canada and the United States. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.
Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Montréal. His works include Aural Poetics (2023), the Documents on Expanded Poetics books series (2018– ), the critical journal Amodern (2013– ), The Ritualites (2018), Sonic Materialities (2016), and Transaction Record (2014). An active collaborator across artistic practices to produce experimental editions and language works, Nardone’s recent and ongoing collaborations occur with Dana Michel, Dylan Robinson, Ryan Clarke, and Tanya Lukin Linklater. His forthcoming works include a monograph on contemporary poetics, a book of dialogues, and a translation of Abigail Lang’s La conversation transatlantique.
Patrick Nickleson is a settler music historian from southwestern Ontario. He is currently Assistant Professor of musicology at the University of Alberta, where his research explores music’s role in dispossession, and unfounded claims of propriety on historical, experimental, and popular sound recordings.
Skeena Reece (Tsimshian/Gitksan/Cree, b. 1974) is an artist based on the West Coast of British Columbia. Her installation and performance work has garnered national and international attention, most notably for Raven: On the Colonial Fleet (2010) presented at the 2010 Sydney Biennale as part of the group exhibition Beat Nation. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes performance art, spoken word, humour, “sacred clowning,” writing, singing, songwriting, video and visual art. She studied media arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and was the recipient of the British Columbia Award for Excellence in the Arts (2012), the VIVA Award (2014) and the Hnatyshyn Award (2017). For Savage (2010), Reece won a Genie Award for Best Acting in a Short Film and the film won a Golden Sheaf Award for Best Multicultural Film, ReelWorld Outstanding Canadian Short Film, Leo Awards for Best Actress and Best Editing. Solo exhibitions include Surrounded at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2019); Touch Me at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay, BC (2018); Moss at Oboro Gallery, Montréal (2017) and The Sacred Clown & Other Strangers at Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Winnipeg (2015). Group Exhibitions include Red on Red: Indigeneity, Labour, Value at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2022); Women & Masks: An Arts-Based Research Conference at Boston University (2021-22), Interior Infinite at the Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2021); Àbadakone at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018-2019) and Sweetgrass and Honey at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2018), among others.
Join us for an afternoon program of performative responses to two critical new publications. Convened by Maria Hupfield and Michael Nardone, this collaborative program combines the improvisational nature of performance art with readings and activations by invited respondents Tanya Lukin Linklater, Peter Morin, Patrick Nickleson, Skeena Reece and Charlene Vickers. Taking the Belkin’s program series The Score as a framing device and reference point, conversations between contributors to both Breaking Protocol and Aural Poetics will resonate between performance, intergenerational listening and convergences between the aural and oral.
How do artistic modes of call and response, transmission and reception, speaking and listening, open spaces for reciprocity and multiplicity? On the occasion of Breaking Protocol, a book by transdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield, and Aural Poetics, edited by Michael Nardone, this double book launch introduces the books as prompts for discussions of sound, art and cultural memory across an ecology of practices.
This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited; to reserve a spot, email belkin.rsvp@ubc.ca.
With written reflections, photo essays, scores, poetry and short stories, Breaking Protocol derives from Hupfield’s “Coffee Break” sessions—a series of conversations organized with the Vera List Center over Zoom during the pandemic, in which Hupfield invited international Indigenous performance artists to discuss their work, and who in turn invited other artists to join the conversations. In Aural Poetics, Nardone worked with composers, artists, poets and theorists to consider how “the domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices.”
Off Script is co-organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School, in collaboration with Maria Hupfield and Michael Nardone, with support from the Vancouver Art Book Fair. The program is convened in the context of 2020–2022 VLC Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield’s Breaking Protocol (Inventory Press and VLC) and Michael Nardone’s Aural Poetics (OEI Ëditor).
Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary artist working in performance and media arts. She was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018), a Lucas Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design, Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2020), and the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award (2023). Hupfield is a Guest Curator for the Artists of Color Council, Movement Research at Judson Church, Winter 2020, and an inaugural resident of the Surf Point Foundation Residency 2020. Her solo Nine Years Towards The Sun at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, (2019) focuses on exhibiting performance as living culture and follows her first major institutional solo exhibition in Canada, The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her work has shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016) and traveled nationally with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14); with recent performances at the National Gallery of Canada. Hupfield is an off-rez citizen of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Anishinaabe Nation, and the Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto.
Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist and curator. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped, by Tahltan epistemological production and often takes the form of performance interventions. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievements by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, New Zealand, and Greenland, as well as across Canada and the United States. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.
Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Montréal. His works include Aural Poetics (2023), the Documents on Expanded Poetics books series (2018– ), the critical journal Amodern (2013– ), The Ritualites (2018), Sonic Materialities (2016), and Transaction Record (2014). An active collaborator across artistic practices to produce experimental editions and language works, Nardone’s recent and ongoing collaborations occur with Dana Michel, Dylan Robinson, Ryan Clarke, and Tanya Lukin Linklater. His forthcoming works include a monograph on contemporary poetics, a book of dialogues, and a translation of Abigail Lang’s La conversation transatlantique.
Patrick Nickleson is a settler music historian from southwestern Ontario. He is currently Assistant Professor of musicology at the University of Alberta, where his research explores music’s role in dispossession, and unfounded claims of propriety on historical, experimental, and popular sound recordings.
Skeena Reece (Tsimshian/Gitksan/Cree, b. 1974) is an artist based on the West Coast of British Columbia. Her installation and performance work has garnered national and international attention, most notably for Raven: On the Colonial Fleet (2010) presented at the 2010 Sydney Biennale as part of the group exhibition Beat Nation. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes performance art, spoken word, humour, “sacred clowning,” writing, singing, songwriting, video and visual art. She studied media arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and was the recipient of the British Columbia Award for Excellence in the Arts (2012), the VIVA Award (2014) and the Hnatyshyn Award (2017). For Savage (2010), Reece won a Genie Award for Best Acting in a Short Film and the film won a Golden Sheaf Award for Best Multicultural Film, ReelWorld Outstanding Canadian Short Film, Leo Awards for Best Actress and Best Editing. Solo exhibitions include Surrounded at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2019); Touch Me at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay, BC (2018); Moss at Oboro Gallery, Montréal (2017) and The Sacred Clown & Other Strangers at Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Winnipeg (2015). Group Exhibitions include Red on Red: Indigeneity, Labour, Value at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2022); Women & Masks: An Arts-Based Research Conference at Boston University (2021-22), Interior Infinite at the Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2021); Àbadakone at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018-2019) and Sweetgrass and Honey at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2018), among others.
Through the performance and study of unconventional scores by Indigenous artists, the Score Research Cluster engages with decolonization by challenging existing sonic, physical and conceptual frames of Indigenous and settler–colonial knowledge.
[more]A series of performances that explore the sounds - and silence - of a now-quiet campus.
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