Intersections: Historical Practice and Creative Arts

(Small closed workshop)

This workshop provides the opportunity for brain-storming and planning for projects at the intersection of the contemporary arts and historical practice, to build a set of principles and practices, and a kind of test "lab" for arts/historical integration. Outside guests include: Toronto-based Cree Métis artist and OCAD faculty member Jason Baerg; Nicolás Grandi, filmmaker, transdisciplinary artist; Raghavendra Rao K.V., multidisciplinary artists and Artistic Director, South Asian Canadian Histories Association; and Ratika Singh, photographer and filmmaker who runs the Preetnagar Residency in Punjab, India. Our goal is to develop a project for a major SSHRC application in 2020.

(Image: Art and Activism: The fight to save the Venkatappa Art Gallery in Bangalore, Karnataka, India from privatization.)

----------------------

The goal overall of this workshop is to engage in preliminary development of a partnership project that will draw together a range of cultural historical work and contemporary creative practice across institutions and individual artists and scholars in Canada, the UK, Europe, India and Pakistan.

The developmental phase of the initiative at UBC, under the direction of Dr. Anne Murphy, has been pursued over the last approximately 5 years, and has included a number of components. It draws on work completed for the commemoration of the Komagata Maru incident with a number of partners in 2014 and work completed in 2017 in association with the South Asian Canadian Histories Association (SACHA), represented at the workshop by both Murphy, a co-founder of the organization, and Raghavendra Rao K.V., also a co-founder and Artistic Director for SACHA; both projects engaged the visual arts and performance to interpret the past. Dr. Murphy organized an exploratory arts workshop, funded by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, in 2017 along such lines, in association with the Annual Event for Punjabi Studies at UBC, the Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Program. To enhance related work at UBC and coordinate with pedagogical initiatives, in 2017-8 Dr. Murphy co-organized with Cluster Steering Committee Member Dr. Hallie Marshall (UBC Theatre and Film) a seminar series to promote collaboration at UBC entitled "Enacting Culture/s: Theatre and Film Across Disciplines." Currently, Murphy is finishing participation as a project team member on on "Creative Interruptions," a project led by Churnjeet Mahn (University of Strathclyde, UK), with other colleagues, from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), 2016-19. In its Punjabi component, that project has explored the history and memorialization of a shared pre-Partition religious past today in the Indian Punjab through artists' residencies in Fall 2018 and an exhibition in Amritsar and Preet Nagar, India in February 2019 and in London in June 2019. Raghavendra Rao K.V. acted as artistic lead on the "Creative Interruptions" project, and it was developed and executed with the Preetnagar Residency, led by workshop participant Ratika Singh. UBC partners with SACHA and The Reach Gallery and Museum in Abbotsford, BC to include this work with work completed in December 2019 in Lahore, Pakistan, at Beaconhouse National University, for exhibition at The Reach in mid-2020, with the support of a Canada Council for the Arts grant.

Main participants:

Jason Baerg is a Toronto based Cree Métis artist and educator whose practice serves optimistic futurities.

Adrienne Fast is the Curator of Art & Visual Culture at The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford BC, and she is also a Research Associate at the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Buenos Aires based Nicolás Grandi is a filmmaker, transdiciplinary artist and educator working in the field of art as liberation. 

Michelle McGeough (Métis) is an Indigenous art historian, artist, and curator, and teaches in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at UBC.  She received her MA from Carleton University and her PhD from the University of New Mexico.

Anne Murphy, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies at UBC, is a cultural historian who works on the Punjab region of India and Pakistan.

Raghavendra Rao K.V. is a multi-disciplinary artist, originally from Bangalore and now living in Vancouver, BC. He is Artistic Director of the South Asian Canadian Histories Association.

Ratika Singh is a photographer and filmmaker From India. She founded Preet Nagar Residency (Punjab) where she is involved in art and research projects involving grassroots initiatives. 

Zool Suleman is the Executive Director of the Rungh Cultural Society (rungh.org). He is also the Editor of Rungh, a publication which features work by Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) artists. His research and creative interests focus on the intersections of migration, race, culture, and archive.