The second in an ongoing series of events, Reactivating: Art and Archives gathers a community of interest around the issues of art, activism and archives. Talks by Christine D'Onofrio, Amy Nugent and Becki Ross will be followed by group discussions.

Collective Acts taps into the generative potential of archival research by artists into experiments with collective organizing and cooperative production, presenting new work by Dana Claxton, Jeneen Frei Njootli and the ReMatriate Collective, Christine D’Onofrio and Heather Kai Smith, alongside work by Salish Weavers Guild members Mary Peters, Adeline Lorenzetto and Annabel Stewart. Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts is curated by Lorna Brown and is the third 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.  

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.

How is an archive formed? Memories of performance often exceed the containment of the document, whether photography, film, prop or testimony. As communities disperse and regroup over time, figures may slip away from the centre. Circling around the embodied archive, the exhibition Radial Change is drawn from the title of a dance work by Helen Goodwin. The elusive histories of Goodwin’s choreography and her influence on the interdisciplinary art scene of the 1970s are explored in new installation works by Evann Siebens and by Michael de Courcy.

Working together at Kingcome Inlet in Summer 2018, a group of artists used film, video, social media, weaving, animation, drawing, language and song to address the urgent threats to the land and water. A manifestation of the relationships formed between the participants over this past year, Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always is based on sharing knowledge and respectful collaboration. Simultaneously research, material, media, testimony and ceremony, the exhibit challenges the western concept that the power of art and culture are limited to the symbolic or metaphoric, and that the practices of First Peoples are simply part of a past heritage. As Marianne Nicolson states, “We must not seek to erase the influence of globalizing Western culture, but master its forces selectively, as part of a wider Canadian and global community, for the health of the land and the cultures it supports. The embodied practice of ceremonial knowledge relates to artistic experience – not in the aesthetic sense, but in the performative: through gestures that consolidate and enhance knowledge for positive change.” Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always positions the gallery as an active location for this performance, drawing together many faculties and disciplines of the university in generative exchange.