Installation view of William Kentridge: The Colander; Photo by Rachel Topham Photography
Please join visual artist and YCW Marketing and Outreach Coordinator Mirna Abdelsayed for an Arabic Exhibition Tour of the exhibition, William Kentridge: The Colander, (to September 4, 2021) on August 26th, at 11:00 am.
Mirna Abdelsayed recently joined Griffin Art Projects on a Young Canada Works Summer Student contract. With a passion for the arts, Mirna has explored various mixed media to consider how technology is affecting the representation of our creative awareness in relation with the language of art forms. She has exhibited artworks at UBC, NOW NOW WOW 2017, and at The Federation of Canadian Artists, 2020 Social Distancing. Mirna holds a BFA from UBC in Visual Arts and is currently studying for her Data and Marketing Analytics certificate.
This informal exhibition tour, facilitated by Mirna Abdelsayed, is intended to bridge the language gap, address non-English speaking audiences and the local Middle Eastern community, and provide context for William Kentridge: The Colander, curated by Lisa Baldissera in Arabic. This tour will reflect on ways that art and artists address the gaps in dominant discourse and narratives by creating and sharing space for underrepresented voices to tell their stories.
Drawing from private collections in Western Canada as well as a selection of previous works, including the decades long film cycle, Drawings for Projections (1989 – 2020), this exhibition also features new works from the Kentridge Studio, South Africa produced during 2020’s global pandemic. William Kentridge: The Colander explores the critique of political structures in Kentridge’s printmaking and filmmaking—looking at the layered, kinetic and collaged nature of his formal working processes, to investigate the porousness and vulnerability of artmaking and life—as well as the processes of the studio in his 2020-2021 series, Studio Life. Planned with the assistance of Jillian Ross Print, Parts & Labour, VivianeArt, Calgary and David Krut Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, The Colander will be held at Griffin Art Projects from May 29 to September 4, 2021.
The exhibition was accompanied by a public program, titled Worldings, which includes a series of international and Canadian online public programs and residencies that explore the unique artistic perspectives and histories that exist in Canadian and South African experience as seen through the eyes of artists, writers, curators and arts administrators. The project reflects on the concept of ‘the colander’ and how the global events of 2020 expose, through the experiences that have unfolded in each place, unique histories of precarity, globalization and colonization, to focus on resilience and resistance. This project initially was conceived to consider parallels that exist between Canadian and South African histories of colonization, as well as each country’s eventual Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the reverberations and effects of these colonial political regimes within contemporary 21st century life. This has since unfolded into a program that will focus on the resiliency with which these challenges have been faced through the lens of the events of historical events of the last year, and the ways in which solidarity, resistance and advocacy are remitted in hope, for their capacities to elicit lasting structural change and collective care.