Ka Kiskihi:tamowiwin
Louis Ogemah | Judy Anderson | Reona Brass | David Garneau | April Mercredi
Curated by Leanne L'Hirondelle

November 5 - December 10, 2004
Opening reception and performance Friday, November 5 at 7 pm
Panel discussion Thursday, November 4 at 7pm to 9pm at The First Nations University.
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"The legitimacy of the future is built almost solely on the illegitimacy of the past - that seemingly limitless series of failures, invasions, conspiracies, destructions and betrayals." Elias Khoury

Historically, and up until recently, burial sites of Aboriginal peoples have been primarily ignored, studied for curiosity in the name of science or treated with extreme disregard. These sites have been paved over, farmed on and buildings have been constructed over them. This was part of the process of treating the land and Aboriginal peoples as if they did not exist - the colonial strategy of erasure. It was a way of emptying space so that it could be essentially filled up with European people, architecture and horticultural practices.

The appropriation of burial sites has helped to dislocate and disconnect Indigenous peoples from their past, creating a feeling of dislocation from our heritage. An essential part of being human is the need to honor those that have passed through life. By taking away these sites, colonialists have also taken away the humanity of Aboriginal people. Canada's colonial past is treated as a series of heroic deeds proliferated by European immigrants against a backdrop of Aboriginal peoples. This project is an exercise in reappropriation through artistic voice.

Ka Kiskihi:tamowiwin will focus on contemporary artistic practice as it relates to the issue of erasure within the context of Canadian society.

Ka Kiskihi:tamowiwin involves five Aboriginal artists that work in contemporary artistic practice (installation, performance and multi-media) creating works around burial sites that have been appropriated by the dominant culture. The works will take forms ranging from performance and installation to painting and sculpture. These works honor and acknowledge First peoples' struggles, making this project relevant to aboriginal peoples across the land.

The works will be presented to the public in various forms: the gallery, a catalogue and a panel discussion–in order to reach as broad an audience as possible and be as accessible as possible. The catalogue will be distributed to universities, libraries, First Nations bands, Metis communities, galleries and schools. The panel discussion following the exhibit will include an Indigenous elder, the curator of the exhibition, artists and community members to increase dialogue surrounding the issues addressed through the project.

The artists who will be participating are: Louis Ogemah; Manitoba, Judy Anderson, Reona Brass and David Garneau; Saskatchewan, and April Mercredi, Alberta. The panel includes Maria Campbell, Robert Innes, Brian Scribe and Gerald McMaster.

Thanks to The First Nations University for the use of their gymnasium, the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre and Carfac.

*Leanne L'Hirondelle, Curator.

Kirsten Forkert
November 16th to 21st, 2004
Opening reception at AKA Gallery Friday, November 19 at 8 pm
For more information or to MAKE AN APPOINTMENT, call the gallery at (306)652-0044 or email Kirsten Forkert at kforkert@telus.net

misdirecting attention

misdirecting attention will use as a starting point, the sites or activities we associate with collective experience, as defined through the market and/or official culture (popularity as collective experience). These sites and activities are situations for diversion, if we think of diversion both in terms of leisure and a deflection, a manoeuvre for shifting our attention (creating a diversion). We are assumed to experience these situations in the same way, as they are meant to be used. misdirecting attention‚ is about misusing these situations, by performing activities that are one-on-one, perhaps even private, in situations that are meant for large groups. Examples of these situations could be watching a movie, or a sports event.

Call for participants:

As part of this project, I am looking for participants to share these mis-experiences with me. Please contact the gallery to make an appointment. As you are more familiar with Saskatoon you can choose a location, or we can decide on one together. The duration of each meeting will loosely range between twenty minutes and two hours, although it can be shorter or longer as you wish.

This project is part of a series of works that involved interactions with individuals and small groups. Thanks to the Canada Council (Inter-arts) for their support of this series.

Kirsten Forkert is an artist, teacher and occasional art writer based in Vancouver. Her practice deals with the nature of collective experience in a neoliberal society, with its climate of social fragmentation and emphasis on niche markets. Upcoming projects are: organizing a mini symposium in Toronto on the avant-garde and consumer culture in Toronto, and a performance/installation in Vienna entitled Crowd Control, both in collaboration with John Dummett.

(click to enlarge image)

The sound is loud and close. Each breath fixes and holds my attention. It ruptures the quiet that surrounds me, and heightens my response to the site(s)/sight(s) of TRIP. I trace the origin of this immediate, concrete signifier of life to Breath, one of five videos by Switzer. The video frame is filled with a single close-up image of a talking-doll's face-her lips move-and oddly paired with a simple rhythmic sound cycle, recording inhalation and exhalation. This gives an unexpected, ambiguous vitality to my reading of the doll's face. For a moment I think the doll is human. Fortune is similarly disturbing, for it reconstructs a magical encounter with a gypsy fortuneteller whose mechanized form delivers readings of human destiny. The texts inscribe what is arbitrary and familiar about daily existence, offering archetypal narratives of yearning and loss, hope and betrayal.

You will wish for world peace.
You will welcome your lover's lies.

With each video, Switzer constructs a place of possible narrative. I am captivated by the sight/site of Fall. Its surface has rich texture and intense colour gradations, a result of layering four images of the same rain falling on water. She makes a single digital intervention by masking a circle. To her viewer, it suggests a searchlight, or a spotlight on an area where an unknown event has or is about to occur. Perhaps someone/something will emerge from the water. The image is ambiguous and offers the possibility of becoming.

That tension is almost palpable in Switzer's video Wantings. The candles of a birthday cake ignite, burn and flicker out with a breath of air (the video loop repeats endlessly). For each of the 13 birthdays that mark the passage of girlhood, a text enumerates birthday wishes culled from a multitude of e-mailed desires she invited friends and family to send to her. I respond with numerous personal associations and recollections of my own that add specificity and variation to this cyclic-narrative. Fully lit, the 35 candles signify past years of Switzer's own lifetime. With the passage of time, yearnings multiply. Similarly, disappointments. Birthdays are celebratory times, and they are grief filled, for it is in the presence of these events that absence is most remarkable.

Excerpts from a text by Janice Andreae, January 2002.

Ana Rewakowicz: Travelling with my inflatable room
September 29 - 30 330 Avenue G South
Artist talk Thursday, September 30 at 7 pm at AKA Gallery

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The Travelling with my inflatable room project explores the concepts of belonging and mobility and combines the artist's personal experience with the utopian notions of discovery and pioneering; values upon which the history of North America was built.

This fall, Ana Rewakowicz will travel in a van carrying the inflatable room and set it up at different urban (local parks, plazas, parking lots) and rural locations across Canada in order to live out of it during that time.

In 2001 Rewakowicz took a rubber latex mould of a room from her previous apartment in Montréal and constructed an external support structure in order to inflate the entire piece. As a person who has moved from one culture to another, she is interested in the issue of transience and how it relates to the notions of identity, belonging and living in a society of fast moving globalization and technological developments. By creating a 'personal, portable' room, she wanted to reflect upon these circumstances and connect the ideas of 'home' and 'nomadism'. The latter denies the dream of a homeland, with the result that home, being portable, is available everywhere.

Ana Rewakowicz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Poland, of Ukrainian origin, now living and working in Montreal, Canada. She works with inflatables and explores relations between temporal, portable architecture, the body and the environment. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is presently participating in the Air Programme residency with Foam (http://fo.am) in Brussels, Belgium.

Hosted by AKA Gallery. Funded by the Canada Council

Assorted Public Performances: Kelly Mark
June 17 - 19, 2004
Public Reception: Friday, June 18, 8pm

The behaviour of one who performs small innocuous tasks repeatedly is often labeled obsessive. Kelly Mark has always had an intense preoccupation with the differing shades of pathos, humour and even violence found in the repetitive mundane tasks, routines and rituals of everyday life. (The violence, for instance, can be literal with direct physical interventions, or more subjective as in the slow-burn violence of time, compulsion and even in the little daily blows both given and received by us all. The humour both comic and tragic…at times indistinguishable). A task or gesture performed over and over again can be a quest for excellence or knowledge; however, more often it is simply a mind numbingly futile chore. Yet hidden within these spans of time can be found startling moments of poetic individuation, an imprint of the individual found within the commonplace rituals of society. Individuation, especially within this uniformity, although subtle and frequently paradoxical, is something Mark returns to again and again. Through the artist's ‘will to order’ and frequently inane sense of humour, the objective is the investigation, documentation and validation of these singular ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ moments of our lives.

Mark will be presenting a number of assorted public performances during her stay in Saskatoon, including the following:

Staff

"I tend to show up late. I usually leave early. I take long breaks. I have issues with authority. I don't follow instructions. I don't work well with others. I drink on the job. I complain a lot. But I'm always working...

Hiccup #4

Mark will be enacting a new version of her ongoing performance Hiccup. In this performance the artist enacts the same mundane but orchestrated performance over a number of days. Staged in public places, these unannounced performances place Mark's synchronized routine against a changing background of everyday circumstances.

How to be a safe, sane and prosperous outcall stripper
screened with short film 1-900-asianprincess
Performance and Public Reception: Friday, May 28, 8pm

IT'S NOT ABOUT SEX, IT'S ABOUT POWER
The Politics of Stripping, Stripper Art, and Survival
Saturday, May 29, 2pm

An initiative of paved Art + New Media in partnership with AKA Gallery and in co-sponsorship with the Mendel Art Gallery and CFCR FM 90.5 Community Radio, the second installment of this public art festival was jam-packed with contemporary public art works that spanned the city from one end clear over to the other, by artists from here in Saskatoon and across North America.

Participating artists included:
Lois Andison - Toronto
Jon Busch - Saskatoon
Liz Canner - New York
Michael Fernandes - Halifax
Andrew Forster - Montreal
Simon Frank - Hamilton
Kathleen Irwin - Regina
Stephane Lauzon - Saskatoon
Tor Lukasik-Foss - Hamilton
Jillian McDonald - New York
Diana Savage - Saskatoon
Jackson Two Bears - Victoria
Rachelle Viader-Knowles - Regina

SPASM II featured exhibitions, performances, lectures, a bus tour, and various other activities designed to activate discussion around the notion of public art within Saskatoon. As adjunct programming to SPASM II, AKA also presented San Francisco performance artist Gennifer Hirano.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this ambitious project and helped to make it such a phenomenal success!

Watch for the upcoming SPASM II publication for a more in-depth reflection on this project.

http://www.spasmpublicart.ca

IN YOUR FACE
April 27 - June 6, 2004

Start making friends with a teen-ager in your neighborhood today! In the months of April, May, and June AKA is programming an offsite project entitled IN YOUR FACE, geared towards making contemporary visual arts accessible to youth and developing youth audience in Saskatoon. IN YOUR FACE is a special outreach project spearheaded by Amalie Atkins, our able Public Programming Intern.

IN YOUR FACE is a traveling animation/film/video festival housed in a mobile, self-contained, environmentally friendly, teardrop-shaped trailer towed by 100% bike power! The caravan of short films will tour through the streets of Saskatoon, making its way through high-traffic pedestrian areas such as skate-parks, high schools, youth drop-in centers, movie theatres, parks, and surprise appearances at arts and cultural events and festivals.

Featuring videos by the talented and quick witted...

Daniel Barrow "A Miracle"
Brenda Goldstein "How To"
Stuart Hughes "Ro Bike"
David La Riviere "The French Connection Connection"
Mandy Pattinson "The Wizard of Oz"

This project is supported in part by City of Saskatoon and Young Canada Works at Building Careers in Heritage.

Portrait Régional/Regional Portrait: Pierre Beaudoin
March 12 - 19, 2004

For his first visit to Saskatoon, Montreal-based Pierre Beaudoin will live and work in Saskatoon, attempting to create a portrait of the population of this city through the use of mildly invasive questioning. This is a performance that proposes direct contact with the people to then re-introduce the community to itself by broadcasting the information he has gathered back to the communities he has visited. It's for you to discover the means by which he realises this new project!

TREMBLEMENT de CHAIR & other transsexual tremors: Mirha-Soleil Ross
February 6 - March 12, 2004
Opening reception & performance: Friday, February 6, 8 pm

A selection of experimental videos elaborated from performance art projects. Titles include Tremblement de Chair, oLullaby o Allo Performance! o Materstina, and Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore.

'BINI
Written & performed by Mirha-Soleil Ross
Performance: Friday, February 6, 8 pm

Mirha-Soleil Ross picks up a few fragments from her childhood and takes us on a ride with a caravan of colorful characters. Detailing her grand father's tragic relationship with alcohol, she offers hilarious yet poignant insights into growing up poor in the Québec of the early 70's and speaks to the importance of honoring memory, of reconciliation, and of moving on.

The Colours of Art
City Park Collegiate High School
January 13 - 30, 2004
Opening reception: Tuesday, January 13, 3 - 6 pm

As one of our partnerships within the Saskatoon community, AKA presents this exhibition by students in an integrated educational curriculum; they will design, promote, create and install this show.