There was a rumor circulating among the Germans as such: “There are 13 Korean students in Potsdam right now. In Germany, 13 is an unlucky number. So, one of them will be unlucky.”

Upon entering the artist’s great-grandfather’s name on Google, she found a section within an article mentioning his time in Germany leading up to his death. The unlucky Korean student that the Germans were foreseeing was her great-grandfather. 

In Sora Park’s exhibition “One of Them Will Be Unlucky”, she used her own family's history of migration as an impetus to explore the role that language plays in depicting the complexity of understanding diaspora. 

The exhibition was inspired by the artist's great-grandfather who became one of the very first Korean residents in Berlin in the early 1900s. In an attempt to explore her family’s history, she decided to go through her great-grandfather’s belongings depicting his life in Germany as a student. However, the letters and notes written in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and German only raised more questions than answers. 

Sora Park is a Korean-Canadian interdisciplinary artist. In her practice, she explores the impact that globalization and migration have on the creation of various subcultures around the world and how the movement of people and their culture affect the sustainability of these subcultures. 

She explores how quantitative and qualitative data gathered during her research translates into works of art through text, media and installation. She puts an emphasis on a concept of translation in art production as collected data transforms itself into different mediums and is depicted as tangible artworks. 

Her works provides a glimpse into specific subcultures and issues - especially those resulted from globalization and migration - that many people may not be aware of. 

Sora Park received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada and an MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Bergen, Norway. She is a recipient of grants from Arts Council Norway, Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. 

Steven Cottingham is interested in the difference between reality and realism. For instance, how is it that images of fire produce real heat and light? In an era of deep fakes and fake news, images lose their assumption of verisimilitude. But just because they are not ‘true’ does not mean they aren’t also ‘real’. These images are used to construct rather than capture reality—each one of them is produced by workers carrying out certain visions of how reality should be represented and what real life should be like. Cottingham suggests that our shared reality is populated by these constructed images: advertisements and algorithms used for commercial and political ends alike. These omnipresent media forms may not truly represent our diverse, individual experiences of reality, and yet they nonetheless orient us into our daily roles as workers, citizens, and subjects.

By using open source rendering software, Cottingham produced tableaus of implausible but nonetheless realistic (that is, believable) events. A car burns on a soundstage, mixing highly-staged commercial production techniques with spontaneous protest tactics. Heat radiates out from the electronics, reinstating the physicality of otherwise virtual representations. In this way, we can start to grasp the slippage between signs and their signifiers in this disorienting media landscape where nothing seems to add up.

Steven Cottingham is an artist and curator based in Vancouver. Cottingham holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited across Canada, the US and Cuba, as well as several locations in Europe. 

For more information about Steven’s work, visit his website.

Tattooing is inherently Indigenous. Our hands make magic, our hands heal hurt. Through the stitching of skins we connect to things that we know but can’t always see. The works presented in ‘As Old As The Hills’ are a step back to see how much is interconnected. Like a spider, we innately weave webs to catch what we need to nourish our souls.

As an artist who practices handpoke and skin stitching tattooing traditions, I see how tattooing acts as a mirror. I am slowly unpacking Nehiyawak tattooing to see what it is made up of. I am exploring natural pigments, stories, dreams, transference, and the savage. I am noticing how the adornment of our bodies through clothing, jewelry and tattoos carry with them power and protection. I am curious about tattoo culture as a whole and how the term ‘traditional tattoos’ carry multiple definitions. How do old school traditional American tattoos reflect in current culture? How does historical slang continue to perpetuate colonial perspectives? At what point does tattoo culture at large converge with Indigenous cultures?

Audie Murray is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with various materials including beadwork, quillwork, textiles, repurposed objects, drawing, and media. She is Michif, raised and working in Regina, Saskatchewan, treaty 4 territory. Much of her family and family histories are located in the Qu’Appelle and Meadow Lake regions of Saskatchewan. Audie holds a visual arts diploma from Camosun College, 2016; Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Regina, 2017; and is currently an MFA student at the University of Calgary. She has shown at various locations including the Alberta Art Gallery, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Glenbow Museum, and the Anchorage Museum.

Audie is a practicing cultural tattoo practitioner working with hand poke and skin stitching methods. She was mentored by the Earthline Tattoo Collective in the summer of 2017 and continues to work with the collective. Her tattoo practice is an extension of her visual arts practice through the reclamation and assertion of Indigenous bodies and the intertwining presence of themes like medicine, healing and growth.

Audie's art practice is informed by the process of making and visiting. Her practice explores themes of contemporary culture and how this relates to experiences of duality and connectivity. Working with specific material choices, she often uses found objects from daily life and transmutes them . This practice is a way to reclaim and work through various subject matter, much of it relating to the body, space, and relationships with a focus on the intersection and expansion of time.

For more information about Audie’s work, visit her website..

The relationship between the aesthetic and political is not a direct correlation, but depends on accumulating experiences of dissensual moments.

—Jaimey Hamilton Faris. Uncommon Goods: Global Dimensions of the Readymade. Intellect, 2013. p. 145. 

A grid of over 100 luminous and brilliantly coloured swatches, less than a foot square each, and composed of tightly-woven seed beads, formed the centrepiece of this exhibition. The beaded swatches, designed by algorithms that take as input colours from the Pantone Fashion Color Report each spring and fall since 2015, are then outsourced for production to Bagalwa Baliahamwabo, a family friend of Paul Robert, and his ad hoc team of artisans in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. 

This ongoing work is a comically tragic re-staging of the antagonisms inherent in production and consumption under globalization. Immaterial labour in the form of commodities’ intellectual and cultural content is contrasted with something that sits uneasily between the romanticized craftsmanship of the indigenous artisan and the cheap manual labour of the foreign factory worker. Capital and commodities flow effortlessly between nations that in so many other ways remain literally worlds apart. Robert strives to give a fresh visibility to these conditions, recognizing his contribution as a single node in an ecosystem of more and less entitled, provocative, and idealistic voices.

Beadwork evokes a history of trade that continues to this day. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, Venetian glass beads were produced en masse specifically for trade with the colonies of the so-called “New World” and Africa. There, they underwent a process of commodity indigenization as they were incorporated into dress, custom, and ritual, and eventually sold back to European tourists as exotic souvenirs. Today, Canada is connected to Africa by flows of gold, copper, diamonds, and tungsten. Well-intentioned but simplistic responses, like the banning of conflict minerals, often make things worse for the poorest while performing the ideological function of absolving westerners of imagined links to warlords. 

Mr. Bagalwa was a long-time correspondant with Robert's father, Aurèle Robert. He persisted in writing letters to the Robert family even after Aurèle's passing. Paul's eventual response to Mr. Bagalwa's remarkable agency has resulted in artifacts that he hopes contribute to the reconfiguration of the normalized logic of global labour-commodities into newly visible and meaningful materialities.

For more information about Robert’s work, visit http://paulrobert.ca/2020/teinture-de-bukavu/

Christopher Lacroix interrogates the relentless effort of queer existence — an existence that is both aspiring to and rejecting normative social structures that problematizes deviant ways of being. This paradox of simultaneous aspiration and resistance is embodied in unnerving durational performances infused with an uncomfortable balance of tragedy and melodrama. Rather than reproducing the pain that the mainstream social structures inflict on others, his performances redirect the pain onto himself; his identity and his body. What results is a queer and campy masochism that explores abject self-deprecation as a means of self-preservation and resistance.

 Christopher Lacroix (Canadian, b. 1986) holds a BFA from Ryerson University, ON (2012) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, BC (2018). His work has been exhibited at The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), window (Winnipeg), Artspace Contemporary Art Projects (Peterborough), and Forest City Gallery (London). Lacroix was the 2018 recipient of the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

For more information about Lacroix’s work, visit his website.

For more information, visit: https://christopherlacroix.com/