Community Contexts (Asynchronous)
Locating the Community in Curation: Narratives of Place and Curatorial Process with Displaced Communities of Albay, Philippines View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pauline Bianca Ma-alat
The representation and promotion of the identity of Albayano art is an odyssey embarked upon by the foremost curatorial platforms in the province of Albay in Southern Luzon, Philippines. As this study shows, an analysis of these institutions point to a problematic lack of engagement with the communities which they deem to represent. Even among the grassroots communities of Albay, there is a seemingly great lack of awareness concerning these existing platforms of artistic and cultural expression. Further complicating this are the skewed notions of public, space, and art as they are understood by the existing curatorial platforms in Albay--notions characterized by a strong tourism-oriented practice which oftentimes privileges profit and displays a homogenized view of communities. Informed by participatory and process-oriented modes of curatorial engagement, this study seeks to explore the roles and possibilities of curatorial practice in the imaginings of a sense of place, of history, and of community. At the heart of this study is the creation of a platform for select communities to uniquely respond to perceived lacks and handle the venture of identity-formation and placemaking. This is done through community-generated cultural projects which are largely independent of great infrastructural need, financial burden, and pre-existing grand narratives. Emphasis is placed on the processes by which each community executes their own project, in hopes of capturing the unique and nuanced artistic language of each community. The relations lie between and among the communities acting as stakeholders rather than as outsiders and function as guideposts to this study.
Negotiating Authenticity and Identity Within the Cultural Jungle: The Visual Language of Laurens Tan's Babalogic - a Performance Piece View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Tracy, Louis Kavouras
Dutch-born Chinese artist, Laurens Tan has working studios in Sydney, Beijing, and Las Vegas. Throughout his life as an artist, Tan has sought to understand the foundation of his Chinese roots. His search necessitated evaluating experiences, discord, and the generations of cultural power associated with the code-making identity of the Chinese language characters. Tan found what he called 'objective correlative' in the swirling references and symbols in his native script. The forms of the script flow with a Baroque wonder but are completely indecipherable to the uninitiated to the Chinese language. My proposal examines Laurens Tan's sculpture installations called Babalogic - evoking the 1563 Tower of Babel by Dutch painter Pieter Breugel the Elder. My study addresses issues of authenticity and Identity existing in a cultural jungle of being monolingual - "what we say when we have no results". My investigation proceeds as a performance piece---my words/PowerPoint images will be simultaneously interpreted and translated into modern movement by choreographer/dancer Louis Kavouras who will also compose modern jazz music to accompany the paper. And, Laurens Tan, the artist, will aesthetically participate as he responds to the bridging of the spiraling linguistic tiers of Babalogic as attitudinal barriers pressuring the cultural global village within the moment of the performance piece itself. This performance piece reflects on bridging linguistic and cultural impediments.
Acquiring Knowledge through Traditional Dance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vesna Maljkovic
One way to fill the mainstream educational system gaps created by rigid and reductive approaches to building knowledge that are lessening students' curiosity, creativity, and imagination, is to engage holistic education and educate new generations of critical thinking minds. Holistic education, transformational in its nature, is based on the foundation that each person should find an identity, meaning, and purpose in life while nurturing relationships in the community, society, and natural world. A way to nurture holistic learning is through community cultural practices and developing an embodied way of knowing. This concept of the embodied way of knowing sets the premise and direction to explore these practices as a manifestation of a holistic way of being, learning, and teaching. Focusing on the study of cultural practices, and specifically traditional dance, I consider its impact as holistic learning in the development of a whole person. With this, I examine the pedagogical approaches of traditional dance as a way of acquiring knowledge, both a container of knowledge and a methodology of passing it to another generation.
The Game Plan to Keep Singapore Visual Arts Sector Afloat View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Standley Tan
The present study explores the development of the visual arts sector in Singapore. A brief summary is first provided to understand the global art market trend and Singapore visual arts market, followed by Singapore's cultural policy development focusing on its impact on the visual arts sector from the 1970s to present. The study then expands on visual arts and its Value Proposition to society. Visual arts are recognized for their intrinsic and social value for the aging population and education. The research's overarching objective is to provide strategic recommendations for the visual art sector to stay afloat, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the arts sector is especially vulnerable to economic shocks. A mixed-method research approach was adopted to identify the key challenges that visual arts practitioners face. Firstly, the qualitative research elicits the visual artist's opinions and is guided by an interview questionnaire related to their profession and experience to facilitate the discussion. Secondly, quantitative research from employment survey reports and market research firms, which are important labour market indicators, can further validate and strengthen the findings' reliability. A detailed analysis was then conducted on qualitative and quantitative results to identify gaps. Lastly, the investigation was used to shape the strategic recommendations to ensure the sustainability of the visual Arts sector. By applying the various strategic management tools to identify competitive advantages for Singapore's visual arts sector, a set of recommendations was formulated to address the key challenges, and to emerge stronger as the leading Asian art hub.
Grief Identity and Canadian Pre-service Teacher/Researchers: Poetic Renderings Around Trauma, Embodied Trust, and Safety View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lorna Ramsay
This poetic rendering invites action inquiry for Western Canadian future secondary teachers and mentorship through reflexive, embodied arts-based and transformative writing expressions in discovery, knowledge, and action around trauma and grief. Engaging in these practices with at-risk Canadian students have intended benefits, particularly for indigenous youth and those from large numbers of refugee families with traumatic backgrounds of grief and loss, generational displacement, and perhaps many forms of violence. Leggo explains poetic rendering as inquiry, “…ruminating, investigating, and questioning… I slow down and linger with memories, experiences, and emotions. ….I am seeking ways to live with wellness. …to make …decisions that will sustain the ecology of our countless interconnections with all the sentient and non-sentient creation “ (2018). With knowledge of students’ historical narratives, dynamic action through curriculum choices supports emotional vulnerability and encourages multimodal, multiliteracy, and multicultural embodied expression through transformative poetry, music, art, dance, video and theatre. Students with different histories are encouraged to trust identity growth in awareness of what Jardine ad Batycky value as “…shared and contested inheritances, voices, and ancestries….” (2004). With redesigned perceptions around cultural connections of classroom, school, and broader communities, both teacher/researcher and student/researcher have choices to express individually but not in isolation strong, embodied emotions like grief and to have empowerment to feel and belong in safety. “We will not know if others’ intimate experiences are similar or different until we offer our own stories and pay attention to how others respond, just as we do in everyday life” (Ellis, 1993).
Landless Like the Wind View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elly Yazdanpanah, Siavash Farkhak
In this paper, we explain the relationality between the continuous movement of the wind and our lost sense of belonging as foreigners to a place by undertaking a series of a/r/tographical walks during which we communicated with the wind through a human craft (wind vane). Through aligning our movements with the wind, we attempted to walk-with and think-with the wind collectively around the concept of being landless in order to re-think and re-consider this meaning from a more-than-human perspective. In this experience, we applied our bodies to the wind as materials which refer to the entanglement of human and non-human entities wherein the edges and boundaries are ontologically blur and vague. We adopted a/r/tograpahy as a methodology and walking as a mode of inquiry to co-create with the environment and nature through lens of being an artist, teacher and researcher. We undertook several walks using handcrafted wind vane to determine the paths and guide our walks in city of Montreal. In this process, we examined the capacity of the wind vane as a communicating tool and understand the concept of landlessness not only as a subjective experience of the human being but also as a meaning that has been already existed in the world.
The Right to Laugh and the Political-Comic Body View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Richards
In this paper, I examine the case of Indian comedian Munawar Faruqui who was jailed in India before even starting a show in January 2021. In February of 2021, Hindus for Human Rights held a solidarity event called The Right to Laugh for Faruqui and his jailed colleagues. In this paper, I consider the transnational flows and functions of comedy in a global and post-colonial context. Looking at rights discourses and using a transnational feminist approach, I ask several questions: Who has the right to laugh? Who has the right to joke? How is this right bound up in colonial histories, nationalism, race, gender, and religion?
Out of Placeness: Performance in Public Space View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yvette Martin
Planning to evoke community awareness our knowing of our local and how we connect with it in order to explore problems of global climate change and disasters such as cyclones and epidemics, at the local level, has led my art practice to become site specific and performative. This situating of my art in urban and public space has had unpredictable and disconcerting effects as I disrupt local behavioural norms and provoke expressions of a particular politics of place. Carona Cape 2020 was one such performance that led to an incident involving the police, and the label of the artist as “mentally unstable”. This paper begins with an autoethnographic account of Carona Cape2020 as an artist's reflection. It offers interpretation of the experience as a politics of place, drawing on the artist’s intention. In concluding, I ask if it’s possible or desirable for artists to avoid triggering expressions of coercive power and how this may affect our potential interaction with place meaning and feeling out of place.
