chairs /
- Monika Kin Gagnon
- Richard Fung
This event celebrates the 20th anniversary publication of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2020), examining cultural race politics in the arts in Canada in the 1990s. The original book focused on Indigenous artists and artists of colour, as well as the dynamics of cultural race politics in various Canadian cultural milieux, grappling with the challenges of emerging critiques of multiculturalism and diversity. Twenty years later, this event assembles scholars, curators, artists and writers, to discuss how the cultural politics, strategies and critiques engaged in the original book might be productively brought into the present to inform today’s political struggles.
Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She recently co-curated (2017) at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and co-edited (2020) In Search of Expo 67 with Lesley Johnstone.
Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. His single-channel and installation works which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion (2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) and Re:Orientations (2016) have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. He was previously Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, teaching courses in Integrated Media and Art and Social Change.
front cover: Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000
back cover: Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000
panelists /
- Dana Claxton
- Andrea Fatona
- Richard William Hill
- Larissa Lai
- Geneviève Wallen
- Kira Wu
Dana Claxton is a media artist who has exhibited internationally. Her family reserve is Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations in Saskatchewan. She is currently Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and History at UBC.
Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and Associate Professor at Ontario College of Art and Design University where her areas of expertise includes black, contemporary art and curatorial studies.
Richard William Hill is an art historian whose current research is focused on contemporary Indigenous art in Canada and the US from 1980 to 1995. He is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Larissa Lai is the author of The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl and five other books. Recipient of an Astraea Award and finalist for seven more, she holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing there.
Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer. She recently curated Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold (2020) at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and has written for C magazine and the anthology Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada. She is a core member of YTB (Younger than Beyoncé) Collective, and an Exhibition Coordinator at Fofa Gallery, Concordia University.
Artist, Kira Wu has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art conferences, including Disfiguring Identity Symposium, Surrey Art Gallery (2014); Re-dress Express, Centre A, Vancouver (2007); and Interferences, Multi-media and Digital Art Festival in Belfort, France (2000). Wu teaches Photography, Open-Studio, Curatorial Studies, and Art Practice in the Community in the Fine Arts Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
