Future Worldings — Similkameen Artist Residency

FUTURE WORLDINGS
EXHIBITION + RESIDENCIES

Residency at SAR: August 26-31, 2024

Project curated by Lisa Baldissera, Usha Seejarim and Karen Tam

Open Studios and Performance at Griffin Art Projects: Sunday, September 15, 12:00PM–5:00PM

Opening Reception and Curator/Artist Tour: Friday, September 27, 6:00PM–8:00PM

EXHIBITION: September 28 to December 15, 2024

While in residence at SAR and Griffin Art Projects, participating artists will take part in a series of cultural exchanges and events, including a visit to En’owkin Centre; Cultural Protocols and Learning on the Land in the Similkameen with Anona Kampe; a visit to kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery, a salmon restoration project led by the Syilx people; a Decolonization Tour at UBC; and curator-hosted visits to the Museum of Anthropology and the Museum of Vancouver, as well as engagements at other local organizations. Emily Carr University will host Future Worldings artist visits, presentations and workshops.

These events will culminate into the Future Worldings exhibition, which will feature work created during the residencies, alongside additional works from the artists’ studios and collections, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. The artists will consider the questions stated in the curatorial thesis for the Future Worldings project:

What are the conditions for creating the world?

How do we imagine ways of creating a cosmology?

What forms of language/terms/collection of understanding might this encompass?

Connecting the works of all the artists is the centrality of the body as a site of cultural space and of knowing and receiving the world.

About the Project:

Common to South Africa and Canada are histories of colonial occupation, separatist policies that purposefully isolated and even eradicated Indigenous people, institutional racism and ongoing marginalization. Despite attempts at land restitution and the implementation of truth and reconciliation commissions in both countries, the scars of respective historical trauma surface in different ways.

Curated by Lisa Baldissera, Usha Seejarim and Karen Tam, Future Worldings brings Canadian artists Nura Ali (based in Calgary, on the lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Tsuut’ina, Îyâxe Nakoda Nations and Métis Nation Region 3), Sun Forest and Xwalacktun (both residing on the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm [Musqueam], Skwxwú7mesh [Squamish] and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh [Tsleil-Waututh] Nations) together with Johannesburg-based South African artists Pebofatso Mokoena, Lebogang Mogul Mabusela and Wezile Harmans to consider approaches of collective and collaborative “worldmaking.” The project concerns itself with how it may be possible to “world” collectively while retaining the specificities of site, body, history, access and cultural understandings.

In 2021, Griffin Art Projects introduced the six artists in Future Worldings to one another in a two-month digital residency during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Formal and informal online meetings initiated a discursive space in which to share practices with one another from their relative positions across the world as they developed their work. In 2024, on the occasion of the Future Worldings project, the artists and curators gathered in person for the first time, engaging in international cultural exchanges through three diverse residency programs in Canada and South Africa at NIROX (Krugersdorp, South Africa), Similkameen Artist Residency (SAR) (Keremeos, BC) and Griffin Art Projects.

Pictured from left to right: Lisa, Pebo, Xwalacktun, Nura, Sun, Ali, Bahar, Lebo

Lebo Mabusela filling up on gas on the roadtrip to SAR

Xwalacktun's truck outside of the Log House

Xwalacktun, Bahar and Ali in the Similkameen River

Lisa harvesting Sage during Anona Kampe's workshop on the land

Xwalactun watching fellow artists on the hill through his binoculars

Catherine, En'owkin Centre Staff, with Xwalacktun making corn husk dolls

Supplies provided for the corn husk dolls made at the En'owkin Centre

Corn husk dolls made by the artists of Future Worldings at the En'owkin Centre

kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery visit. Staff member Alfred showing the artists the live salmon

Group photo at the kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery

Alfred (kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery) showing the different early life stages of salmon development

Visit to the kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery. Artists interacting with the live salmon

Visit to the Leir House studios run by the Penticton & District Community Arts Council

Anouchka Freybe Zooming in for a visit with the FW Cohort

Open Studios Event with Future Worldings Cohort

Testimonial

Lisa Baldissera, Griffin Art Projects Director

This summer, Griffin Art Projects collaborated with the team at the Similkameen Artist Residency to host six artists from the Future Worldings cohort. This was the first time this group of artists had met one another in person--three from Canada and three visiting Canada from South Africa for the first time--as they reflected upon and developed projects that considered the TRC processes in both countries. The SAR team (Reiko Inouye and Alexandra Bischoff) met with the Griffin team for several months leading up to the one-week retreat at SAR, to plan a series of workshops, hosted events and excursions on the Silyx territory. These experiences were profoundly impactful and allowed nuanced insight into the places, geography, history and challenges of this place--from witnessing the work of the team at the kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery as they have repatriated sockeye salmon over the past two decades to the experience of gathering sage with knowledge keeper, Anona Kampe. The knowledge of the SAR team made this experience amongst the most moving and meaningful for our group. We cannot thank the team enough for their care and insight in designing this retreat together with us.

Meet the Artists

Nura Ali

Nura Ali is a visual artist, writer and curator, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. She received a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a BA in English Literature, Art History and Italian from the University of Leicester and a BA in History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her wide-ranging practice investigates the linguistic and cognitive scaffolding underpinning the ways in which we create meaning.
Sun Forest

Sun Forest is a first-generation Korean Canadian artist whose work is informed by a lifetime of movement through the United States, Canada and South Korea. Working across sculptural materials, video, performance, and new media, Sun’s projects center on the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and naturalization through migration, and the complexities of citizenship and national identity.
Wezile Harmans

Wezile Harmans (born in 1990 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa) is a visual art practitioner whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, video, installation and mixed-media works as a tool for social change. His work confronts prejudices and advocates against social inequality, creating a platform for critical self-reflexivity within unwelcoming spaces.
Lebogang Mogul Mabusela

Lebogang Mogul Mabusela (born in Mabopane) is a self-proclaimed Zinequeen and Monotypebabe currently practising in Pretoria. In 2019 she graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Wits School of Arts, where she was awarded the Standard Bank Fine Arts Prize. Mabusela has participated in a number of group exhibitions in South Africa, including Cape Town Art Fair, The Latitudes Art Fair and David Krut Projects. Internationally, she has shown in Lagos, Nigeria, at Frieze London and in Paris, at Gallery Esperance.
Pebofatso Mokoena

Pebofatso Mokoena (born in 1993 in Alberton, South Africa) holds a BA Honours in Fine Art (distinction) from Witwatersrand University and is completing a Master of Arts in Fine Arts, also at Wits University. In 2014, he completed his NDip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Mokoena taught drawing and presentation at UJ’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture between 2018 and 2021. Emerging from early practice in printmaking, Mokoena’s painting practice is compositionally underscored by precise mark making and division of space that enquires into conceptual-visual politics and explores relations between social-politics, family life and aesthetic philosophy.
Xwalacktun

Dr. Xwalacktun (born in Squamish, BC) is a renowned Master Carver of Coast Salish ancestry, from the Squamish and ’Namgis. His remarkable career extends over forty years, and he has worked in numerous forms, including sculpture, metal, jewelry, glass, drawing and printmaking. He is a recipient of the Order of British Columbia and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and received the 2022 Community Award for Arts and Culture from West Vancouver.

Future Worldings is generously supported by funding received from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Freybe Foundation, the Government of Canada, the Hamber Foundation, Metro Vancouver's Regional Cultural Project Grants program, the Michael and Inna O’Brian Family Foundation, North Vancouver Recreation and Culture, the Peter and Betty Haworth Fund at the West Vancouver Foundation, and the Vancity Community Branch Grant. Xwalacktun’s South African residencies were generously supported by funding received from the BC Arts Council’s Professional Development grant.

Future Worldings is produced in partnership with the Aboriginal Gathering Place and the Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Artist Proof Studios, Bag Factory, NIROX Foundation, Similkameen Artist Residency and Transformative Memory Network / Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia.

FUTURE WORLDINGS EXHIBITION + RESIDENCIES

Nura Ali

Sun Forest

Wezile Harmans

Lebogang Mogul Mabusela

Pebofatso Mokoena

Xwalacktun

FUTURE WORLDINGS
EXHIBITION + RESIDENCIES