As part of Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX), the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group (EAHR) and the Indigenous Art Research Group (IARG) are curating a series of exhibitions at Concordia University’s SGW campus. Waterways brings together works from Asian Indigenous and Asian Pacific artists and researchers to the island of Tiohtiá:ke to exchange knowledge on Asian-Indigenous relations in contemporary art. This exhibition considers the waters between the different islands and continents as a connector between each of the artists’ different lands rather than a barrier. This exhibition series seeks to foster a gathering space for knowledges, shared experiences, and ideas from around the globe.

The artists in Waterways speak to their relationships to water and islands through a range of interdisciplinary research-creation projects. These include, but are not limited to ethnography, engineering, oceanography, digital animation, and photography.

Starting June 12th, this series of exhibitions will take place in various sites of the SGW campus at Concordia University until the end of August.


All exhibitions are wheelchair accessible and free of admission.

SNEAK PEEK From the

​Curatorial Process

Dates: June 12 – September 11, 2019
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Locations: FOFA Gallery (Courtyard), Webster Library Vitrine (LB2), Department of Art History Vitrine (EV 3.809), EV Junction (EV 2.789)

Artists

Waterways

  • FOFA Gallery (EV Courtyard)
  • Webster Library Vitrine (LB2)
  • Art History Vitrine (EV 3.809)
  • EV Junction (EV 2.789)
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​JANE CHANG MI

As an ocean engineer and an artist, Jane Chang Mi considers land politics and postcolonial ecologies. Exploring the narratives associated with environment through her interdisciplinary research-based work. Mi aims to express our contemporary relationship to nature and each other. Utilizing art, she augments her engineering background, to work through the complexity of the multi-layers of our history; less constrained by linguistic signifiers, enabling communication across cultures. She considers our past, present, and future as we journey towards a technologically oriented society.

Featured Artists:

STEPHANIE CHEUNG
Stephanie Cheung is a Hong Kong-based curator, writer, and artist specializing in process-based, participatory and collaborative projects. She takes open form as a format to explore dialogues, and shapes perception through light touches on tactile materials. Art to her is a practice of care, in which she explores more conscientious ways to inhabit the world.
Stephanie received an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2015, and in the same year completed Message in a Bottle with support from the Angela Gill Johnson Memorial Award from the Bamboo Curtain Studio in Taipei. Her writings have been published in international journals such as World Art, CAA Reviews, Asian Art News, etc. As an artist, she has presented site-specific projects in America, England, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts in London.
​BEATRICE GLOW
Beatrice Glow is an interdisciplinary and multi-sensory artist leveraging participatory performance, painting, experiential technology, olfactory art, installations and video to shift dominant narratives. She is currently a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and Smack Mellon Studio Program Artist. Glow's work is an incubator for applied research of public engagement. Recently, through the American Arts Incubator and with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, her focus has been on amplifying Indigenous voices through public art and virtual and augmented reality works in allyship with Indigenous environmental stewardship. Recent activities include solo exhibitions at Duke House, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile; Cuchifritos Gallery, New York; and Wave Hill, Bronx, New York; group shows at Honolulu Biennial 2017; Park Avenue Armory, New York; and Galeri Nasional Indonesia; and a Duke University Press’ Cultural Politics Journal artist feature. As a Hemispheric Institute Council Member, she co-founded the Performing Asian/Americas: Converging Movements workgroup.
​KARI NOE
Kari Noe is a graduate research assistant at the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications (LAVA) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is pursuing a M.S. in Computer Science. Currently she works with a team of fellow programmers on Kilo Hōkū, a virtual reality simulation designed to teach the basics of modern Hawaiian wayfinding to introductory level students. She is also working on Digitizing Detours, a virtual reality experience meant to digitize Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i, a collection of essays and stories by Hawaiian artists, scholars, and activists. Aside from programming, her other passion lies with art. As an undergraduate she also received a degree in Animation. Her senior film, Kai and Honua was work-shopped in the 2016 Sundance Native Shorts Lab and was screened at the Hō'ea 2018 Kanaka Maoli Film Showcase, 2018 Hawaiʻi International Film Festival ACM night, and the 2019 Cultural Animation Film Festival.
DAN TAULAPAPA MCMULLIN
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa Amelika (American Samoa). The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. His book of poems Coconut Milk (2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. In 2018, his book Samoan Queer Lives, co-edited with Yuki Kihara, was published by Little Island Press of Aotearoa. Taulapapa's artwork has shown at the Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Oakland Museum, Bishop Museum, NYU's /A/P/A Gallery, iBiennale Honolulu, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and the United Nations. His film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award
Henry Tsang
Henry Tsang's projects employ video, photography, language, interactive media, sculptural elements and convivial events to explore the spatial politics of history, language, community, food and cultural translation through global flows of people, culture and capital. Projects include: Tansy Point, a video installation of the site of the 1851 treaty signings by the Chinook peoples and the US government that were never ratified; RIOT FOOD HERE, a public offering of food reflecting on Vancouver’s Anti-Asian Riots in 1907; Maraya, in collaboration with Glen Lowry and M. Simon Levin, that investigates the reappearance of Vancouver’s False Creek in Dubai as the Dubai Marina; video installations Orange County, and Olympus, shot in California, Beijing, Torino and Vancouver, that explore overlapping urban and socio-political spaces; and Welcome to the Land of Light, a public artwork along Vancouver's seawall that underscores the 19th Century trade language Chinook Jargon and the English that replaced it. Henry is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, Canada.

​JASON SIKOAK

Nunatsiavut Inuit artist, Jason Sikoak, was born and raised in The Big Land, Labrador, in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Sikoak’s love of art began watching his uncle, Jack Mugford, as a child. Wishing he could command the materials as his uncle did, Sikoak vowed to learn as much as he could. Sikoak is currently completing his BFA at Concordia University.

​LÉULI ESHRĀGHI

Dr Léuli Eshrāghi (he/ia) is an Australian artist and curator of Sāmoan, Persian and other ancestries, and a Horizon/Indigenous Futures Postdoctoral Fellow, Concordia University. Léuli’s performances, installations, writing and curatorial projects centre on embodied knowledges, ceremonial-political practices, language renewal and hopeful futures throughout the Great Ocean. Léuli’s postdoctoral research-creation project, Desired and Desiring, reflects, critiques and imagines an Indigenous video art museum focusing on gender, body, and desire, developed across two public visual arts organizations in Sydney, Australia. Curatorial projects include Pōuliuli at West Space, Melbourne and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Honolulu (2017), Ua numi le fau at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2016). Recent publications include chapters in Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism(2018) and Associations: Creative Practice and Research(2018). Léuli’s works have been presented at Sharjah Biennial 14: Journey beyond the Echo Chamber (2019), Cairns Regional Art Gallery (2018), Open Space, Victoria (2017), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2016), Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland (2016), and Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2016).