M HKA Ensembles

MuHKA, Antwerpen

17 December 2005 - 26 February 2006

More about the artists

VANCOUVER: AN INTRODUCTION
INTERTIDAL ARCHIVE: VANCOUVER (PRE)HISTORY
STAGING "LANDSCAPE"
THE DAILY SUBLIME
HOMAGES
FIRST NATIONS, SECOND NATURE
LANDSCAPE OF THE ECONOMY
CONTRASTS/CONFLICTS

Tucked away on the far Western shores of Canada, in the breath-taking landscape of Southern British Columbia, we find a region that, until a mere century and a half ago, could best be described as a remote, uncharted wilderness. This is where we come across one of the Pacific Rim’s busiest ports, the cradle of Greenpeace and host city of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, recently hailed as one of the “greatest cities on earth”: Vancouver.

In spite of – or exactly because of – its spectacular isolation far away from the established power centres of the international art world, Vancouver has, in recent decades, grown into a major hub on the contemporary arts circuit. Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Ken Lum, Rodney Graham and Stan Douglas are among the city’s best-known artists; their work shares a remarkable string of commonalities that, inevitably, reveal the import of the ‘local’ within the ‘global’ economy of art. One such a recurrent motif – equally important in the work of younger artists such as Brian Jungen and Scott McFarland – concerns the dialectic of B.C.’s sublime scenic beauty vis-à-vis the drab reality of everyday life in a postmodern ‘frontier’ metropolis.
M HKA’s winter exhibition “Intertidal” – a reference to the Pacific Northwestern coast’s striking tidal rhythms – seeks to address the many paradoxes and complexities that define the riches of Vancouver’s art ‘scene’. An introductory ‘archival’ section provides a historical context; the focus of the exhibition itself, however, is a decidedly contemporary one, highlighting “Vancouver art” of the last decade.
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Intertidal Archive
Including documents and reference works by Jeff Wall, Robert Smithson, N.E. Thing Company, the Morris/Trasov archive, Ken Lum, Glenn Lewis, Robert Kleyn, Roy Kiyooka, Dean Ellis, Christos Dikeakos, Michael de Courcy, Tom Burrows et al.
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Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring contributions by Dieter Roelstraete, Reid Shier, Shepherd Steiner, Monika Szewczyk, Michael Turner, Ian Wallace, Scott Watson and William Wood. Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists is published by M HKA and the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
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SNOW FLAKES & TV-SIGNALS
Parallel with the exhibition, M HKA_media will present an extensive film and media program, in which contemporary Canadian film is viewed from the perspective of the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan.


text by Scott Watson

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