P0L1T1C
Bani Abidi, Allora + Calzadilla, Michael Drebert, Siebren Versteeg
A VIVO Media Arts Centre + New Forms Festival Exhibition

Opens September 4 6-10pm as part of SWARM hosted by Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres
1965 Main Street Vancouver
September 4 — 27 2008
Tues–Sat 12 — 6

September 23 8pm: Artist Q + A with Bani Abidi, Michael Drebert, Siebren Versteeg. Moderated by Kika Thorne.

Four artists mobilize wit to open thought, making room for creative ambiguity in public discourse. Inversion, mimesis, collusion, exodus are the strategies for movement in P0L1T1C, an exhibition presented by VIVO Media Arts Centre in collaboration with New Forms Festival. When citizens are barred from the conversations which affect their lives, Allora + Calzadilla (San Juan) relocate the boardroom to the site under discussion; Michael Drebert (Vancouver) evades political boundaries in flight; Siebren Versteeg (Brooklyn) feeds the AP News Wire through an algorithm of corporate addiction; Bani Abidi (Karachi) addresses the staging of power with its own negation.

P0L1T1C is one part of a series of screenings and exhibitions entitled An Age That Has Lost Its Gestures. This survey tackles the possibility that we are obsessed by proven tactics and that new gestures, if they exist, are indecipherable to us. P0L1T1C contributes to an inventory of contemporary political actions by conceptual formalists.

— Kika Thorne

New Forms Festival 2008.newformsfestival.com
SWARM hosted by Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres www.paarc.ca

VIVO MEDIA ARTS CENTRE is generously supported by its donors, members, staff and artists, the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Government of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver. P0L1T1C is sponsored by Free Geek and JWMHP.

Photo courtesy of the artists, Allora + Calzadilla and the Lisson Gallery.

FAKE SLEEP
September 12, doors at 8pm, $6
organised by Brad Linham

Fake Sleep is a Vancouver Drone music showcase, hosted every two months (roughly). It will attempt to highlight some of the best drone talent that Vancouver has to offer, as well as importing some out of town talent. The first Fake Sleep event was hosted on July 16th at the Cobalt as a curated Fake Jazz Wednesday. Artists performing included Ahna, Magneticring, Empty Love, Ian Gregory James, and Mongst. The second Fake Sleep event will be hosted on September 12th with and at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Artists performing will include Fibrillation (Bangkok), Aerosol Constellations, Gabriel Mindel Saloman, and Empty Love + Les Beyond.

SLAB 2: Votes for Sleepwalkers
Reception: Oct 2, 7 pm
Exhibition: Oct 3-11, Tues-Sat, 12–6 pm
Q & A on screen & live: Oct 7, 7 pm

SLAB is short for Studio LAB, a never-ending experiment driven by the call of its yet unseen evidence, making things that do what they ought, giving people what they don't know they want.

Six such things will be displayed from October 2 to 11 and all questions answered on October 7. An unusual Artists' Talk will be offered, on six screens and with six sleepwalkers present, wholeheartedly inviting your participation and wanting to share the experience with you.

Artists: Brady Marks, David Grove, Ricarda McDonald, Wynne Palmer, Anju Singh, Alex Muir
Behind the scene: Dinka Pignon

Marina Roy | Abbas Akhavan
Exhibition runs October 17 - November 5, 2008
12-6pm Tuesday to Saturday
October 17 8-10pm Opening
October 21 8pm Artists Talk

Marina Roy's Apartment (2008) is an animation loosely inspired by Georges Perec's La vie mode d'emploi (1978), in which the author takes us through each room of a building, following the pattern of the knight's move in chess. Apartment begins with a collage of opulent 18th and early19th-century rooms establishing a relationship between the decline of the ornamental interior and the aristocracy, the rise of new theories of utopia (Saint Simon, Fourier, Marx), the extinction, imprisonment, and scientific investigation of animals. As the animation unfolds, people cohabit with animals, eat gluttonously, enjoy sex, rooms deteriorate, and a virus invades the building, activating multiple transformations, triggering anxieties of monoculture and biopower. Ruined, pessimistic and anti-humanist, Apartment is a marvelous, playful theory around human-animal distinction, the pastoral, as well as a “progression” from conquest to utopia, heterotopia to dystopia.

Marina Roy is a Professor of Visual Arts at UBC, she has worked with Abbas Akhavan since 2000.

Abbas Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran, and has been living in Canada for the last thirteen years. After many hours of assisting in the animation of Apartment, Akhavan developed a video sculpture. Neighbors (2008) is a multi channel tower displaying voyeuristic procedures to point at housing problems in Vancouver. The rapidly expanding high rises and their empty units that house international investors consequently push local communities to the peripheries, giving way to a vacant high security skyline.

Curated by Kika Thorne
Image courtesy of Marina Roy, Apartment (2008)

HITO STEYERL

For those who missed her screening:

THE VIDEOS OF HITO STEYERL AND ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI WHICH WERE RECENTLY EXHIBITED AT VIVO MEDIA ARTS ARE ACCESSIBLE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES IN THE VIDEO OUT DISTRIBUTION VIEWING ROOM.