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Jun 4–Jun 9, 2018
—

Golboo Amani
, Johanna Householder,

Abedar Kamgari
, Lisa Myers
, Lala Raščić
This Could Be The Place

Performance Art + Airstream Trailer = ACTION!

Exhibition Info

This Could Be The Place continues the trajectory of presenting challenging and contemplative performance art on campus using a vintage Airstream trailer as a staging area. Prior events hosted in 2014 and 2016, respectively addressed themes relating to precarity and borders. This third iteration responds to our sense of facing a state of emergency on a daily basis. Five artists have been invited to respond to this theme by addressing the notion of care as a form of restorative cultural labour. What kinds of aesthetic, social, and political practices can we enact to encourage and empower diverse communities to listen, exchange and cooperate in a media-saturated global context mired by environmental, political and cultural crisis? It is our belief that modest acts of care and compassion on a local level lead to positive outcomes that go some way towards enabling a better tomorrow.
— Ivan Jurakic & Bojana Videkanic, co-curators

Monday, June 4 @ Noon
Abedar Kamgari: Untitled
Food has always been integral to my relationship with cultural identity. Diet, of course, can change based on a variety of factors, ranging from income and free time to climate, health and availability. Turmeric is a staple spice in my traditional cuisine, but one that I gradually stopped using after coming to Canada – for fear of its characteristic smell marking my body. In this experimental performance, I play with turmeric as a tool for claiming space for brown bodies in public space and within institutions.

Tuesday, June 5 @ Noon
Golboo Amani: Public Reading

Public Reading is a performance work that engages with audiences in an intimate shared experience. The artist travels through public space with a small library of collected books. Participants pick a book from the literary for the artist to read out loud to them. 

Wednesday, June 6 @ Noon
Lisa Myers: Playing Spoons

A sound interpretation using the two blueprint profiles of the Canadian Pacific Railway mainline. One blueprint from 1800s and the other an altered version, marking places without train stations and often left off maps. This performance with bass guitar and guitar will accompany an acknowledgement of the maps, and the very place of this artwork.


Thursday, June 7 @ Noon
Johanna Householder: Holocene Days

We live in uncertain times, so uncertain we don’t know what to call them: the Holocence, the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or the Chthulucene? The conversation around the current epoch from a quasi-scientific perspective can assist humans in the critically needed repositioning of ourselves as only one of many animalia on the planet. In order to rethink our selves in relation to the land and its discontents, I propose listening for relationships while conceiving alternative futures and presents.


Friday, June 8 @ Noon
Lala Raščić: The Damned Damn

The Damned Dam is a storytelling performance set in 2027. Rooted in research of actual localities and events, this fantastical love story uses the iconography of disaster, to open up issues of a transitional reality, the relationship between capitalism and corruption, between cause and effect, emancipation and justice, and escapism into fiction. The damn as border is at once metaphor and Bosnian epic poetry.

This Could Be The Place was produced with the generous support of the Region of Waterloo ARTS FUND. This Could Be The Place is a co-presentation of the University of Waterloo Art Gallery and UW Fine Arts, in cooperation with CAFKA.18: Recognize Everyone.

Photography: Ivan Jurakic

Artist Biography

Abedar Kamgari is an artist, independent curator, and arts worker based in Hamilton and Toronto.

Golboo Amani is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for her performance and social practice works. She is based in Toronto.

Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. She is a member of Beausoleil First Nation and is based in Port Severn and Toronto.


Johanna Householder works in video, performance art, and audio. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies and shape our perception of bodies, both human and animal, leads her often collaborative practice.


Lala Raščić is a media and performance artist. She divides her time between Sarajevo, Zagreb, and New Orleans.