Belonging to a Place

BELONGING TO A PLACE AN EXHIBITION BY FOGO ISLAND ARTS BELONGING TO A PLACE AN EXHIBITION BY FOGO ISLAND ARTS JUNE 22 to SEPTEMBER 23, 2017 SCRAP METAL Belonging to a Place: An Exhibition by Fogo Island Arts A unique collaboration between Art en Valise, Fogo Island Arts and Scrap Metal, Belonging to a Place is an exhibition by three Canadian organizations that have come together to realize this poetic, forward- thinking project based on shared values. Belonging to a Place features works by a selection of international artists who are alumni or forthcoming participants of the Fogo Island Arts residency program. Curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen, Director of Kunsthalle Wien and Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts and the Shorefast Foundation, the exhibition at Scrap Metal gallery aligns the interests, goals and objectives of all of three parties involved. Presenting sculpture, installation, film, video, painting, performance and works on paper, Belonging to a Place takes on a diverse, experimental and critical approach to contemporary art, its presentation and discussion. BELONGING TO A PLACE How do we connect with a place? The space to which “a place” could refer is rather open: material, How do we belong to a plurality of places? immaterial or occupying somewhere in-between. Could “belonging to Are we all looking for someplace to belong? a place” signify, for instance, the property of a body, a place in one’s mind or within collective thought? Belonging to a place could be An exhibition is a place where questions are brought forward; a place understood as a kinship to a site of worship or a political conviction; where narratives unfold that are at once distinct from reality and intimately it may speak to a place in one’s heart or one’s family heritage. connected to it. In this capacity, Belonging to a Place: An Exhibition by Fogo Island Arts sets the stage where notions of “place” play out. Belonging to a Place draws upon memories, on movement, and their material traces. Perspectives of exile, migration, exclusion and inclusion, The exhibition departs from a consideration of the idea of “place,” isolation and solidarity are explored. At play in the works on view is the seeking to examine where we feel we belong and how we relate to role of history in moulding collective and personal understandings of multiple notions of belonging. belonging. The fragility of memory, the forging of potential futures and One place in particular comes to the fore—the unique locale of thoughtful articulations of present-day concerns are probed by way Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. However, the works of cutting out the chaos of former times or of today—fragmenting or presented do not speak solely of Fogo Island but of other places as creating forms that convey new interpretations on that which is to belong. well, raising ideas on the complexity of the fabric that fashions and In this theatrical realm of representation and contemplation, ecology, situates places in constant transformation. Whether shaped by the geology, people and the political economy are the protagonists. The singular experience of time spent on the island or informed by other poetic power of place serves as a backdrop. The artists creatively places—physical and psychological, immaterial and imaginary— engage with materials, symbols and signs that point to notions of the artists’ works in the exhibition propose new ways of looking at, belonging in a globalized world. unlearning, and rewriting our past, present and possible futures. Today, belonging somewhere, anywhere, is a topic pondered, contested In view of historical and current political posturing, namely through and debated. Notions of place for any single individual are inextricably the channels of nationalism connected to land, culture and to the linked to the places she or he has been, as well as by the images and singular and abstract notion of place, the exhibition points to themes of accounts of places witnessed or imagined. The works in the exhibition territories inscribed by state powers as well as by the social, economic prompt and perform these ideas of place, of displacement, the familiar and geographical factors that shape them. In addition, to speak of people and the foreign, family and society, community and nationality, fantasy and place, whether in terms of communities or individuals, is to consider and our global reality. identity. Can one person truly belong to one place? And if “a place” presupposes a space, then what exactly constitutes the space to which “a place” refers? Nicolaus Schafhausen, Curator On a global level, the singular place implied could amount to the whole planet. Humanity, it can be said, belongs to our same, shared world: the physical environment and the ecosystems sustaining it, as well as the man-made, architecturally defined spaces of humans. Rootedness therefore meets multi-centredness, the personal meets the public, and the national meets the international, global world. However, is there a global without the local? Does a place not call forth a specific site or location? ABBAS AKHAVAN Study for a Garden, 2013 - ongoing Abbas Akhavan was born in 1977 in Tehran. He studied at Concordia Cedar trees University, Montreal and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Dimensions variable Akhavan’s residencies include Foundation Marcelino Botin with Mona Courtesy of the artist Hatoum (Spain); Le Printemps de Septembre (France); Trinity Square Video, Western Front and Fogo Island Arts (Canada); The Watermill Center Abbas Akhavan’s practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral (USA); and The Delfina Foundation (Dubai, UAE & London, UK). Recent installations to drawing, video, sculpture and performance. The direction exhibitions include: Burning down the house at the Gwangju Biennale of his research has been deeply influenced by the specificity of the (2014); Variations on a Garden, Galerie Mana, Istanbul (2013); Study sites where he works: the architectures that house them, the economies for a Garden, Delfina Foundation, London (2012); Tactics for Here & that surround them, and the people that frequent them. The domestic Now, Bucharest Biennale (2012); Tools for Conviviality, Power Plant, sphere, as a forked space between hospitality and hostility, has been Toronto (2012); Beacon, Darling Foundry, Montreal (2012); Phantomhead, an ongoing area of research in his practice. More recent works have Performa 11, New York (2011); and Seeing is Believing, KW Institute for shifted focus, wandering onto spaces and species just outside the Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011). Akhavan is the recipient of Kunstpreis home—the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes. Berlin (2012), TFVA finalist prize (2012), The Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), the Sobey Art Award (2015), and the Fellbach Triennial Award (2016). He lives and works in Toronto and Istanbul. We domesticate the real all the time, in order to comprehend it. Abbas Akhavan. “It’s a Kind of Domesticated Wilderness: An Interview with Abbas Akhavan” by Marina Lorden, Jadaliyya (2016) NADIA BELERIQUE Untitled [Bed Island], 2017 Belerique’s installations combining sculpture, photography and collage Installation merge old and new technologies that seem to echo one another and Dimensions variable oscillate between image and object. The focus of the gaze and the bodily Courtesy of the artist experience within her works are crucial elements she engages with and manipulates to astonishing efect. In and out of focus, sharp and soft, rough and smooth—all juxtapositions and contradictions one could use to describe the often disorienting, Based in Toronto, Nadia Belerique constructs installations that engage seductive tensions at play within the work of Nadia Belerique. Sticky smears with the poetics of perception and question how images perform in on shiny surfaces, sharp and torn edges, opaque and transparent are further contemporary culture. Primarily invested in questions around materiality oppositions brought together, fractured or layered upon one another. and dematerialization through the illusion of photographs, her image- The presence of her person—the performative role behind her artistic based works are often interrupted by sculptural objects. She received production—can be found in subtle traces such as fingerprints or footprints her MFA from the University of Guelph and has exhibited at such glimpsed only from a specific viewpoint or through close inspection. venues as the Art Gallery of Hamilton; Daniel Faria Gallery, The Power Plant, and Gallery TPW, Toronto; 221A, Vancouver, and Kunsthalle During her three-month residency with Fogo Island Arts in 2015, Belerique Wien. Belerique is on the long-list for the 2017 Sobey Art Award. began working on what would become the solo exhibition Bed Island, held in Toronto in 2016. Since then she has continued to build on ideas that are present within the pieces, and to draw connections to her All photographs are a hand and an index finger, pointing to experience on Fogo Island. The works from Bed Island and the subsequent something else. iteration Bed Island (Don’t Sleep) depart from the consideration of the body as an island, and the bed as an extension of that island. Nadia Belerique The bed is a place of rest, passion, dreams and melancholy. It carries with it intimate psychological connotations and can be viewed as a psychic space. As with much of Belerique’s work, the understanding of any space implies both positive and negative connotations, examined from a visual or photographic perspective or through interpretative aspects. The everyday, mostly found elements upon her table/bed sculptures, for instance, are staged and allude to identities. Belerique’s work also draws on her time as a photo editor at The Toronto Star, during which she sifted through and scanned the newspaper’s vast black and white archives. With the creation of her own analogue scanner bed, composed of a pane of frosted glass with a light source above, Belerique experimented with alternative scanning and photographic methods to produce a rich range of images, and later, sculptures.

Load more