March 9, 7:00 PM
Keynote by Dr. Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University)
March 10, 9:30 AM-5:30 PM
Conference panel presentations from graduate students, artists, and arts professionals from Toronto and abroad, followed by a closing reception at OCADU’s Graduate Gallery
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Within the term “history” lies a conceptual confinement—the presumption that the topics being written about remain consigned to the past. This conference seeks to counter history’s containment and to foreground its continuing relevance in the present. Through the notion of “un-histories,” conventional limits can be unsettled by prompting critical inquiries into how history functions: by re-organizing the composition of the past, by re-constructing methods of transmitting narratives, and by destabilizing the seeming linearity of events. Un-histories reimagine history as a practice for addressing the “unconcluded”—subjectivities and narratives previously considered spectral, disparaged, marginalized, erased, shamed, abashed, or localized.
Keynote Presentation
Unthinking Expo 67
Dr. Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University)
March 9, 7:00 PM, 100 McCaul Street, room 190
Dr. Gagnon will present on her co-curated exhibition À la recherche d’Expo 67 / In Search of Expo 67 (2017) which featured 19 Canadian and Québec contemporary artists taking inspiration from the landmark international event, 50 years later. Discussing the original Expo 67 in connection to artworks by Althea Thauberger, Leisure, CINEMAexpo67, Geronimo Inutiq and others, Gagnon speaks on the distinct methods of contemporary art offers for exploring cultural history. Engaging the process of “unthinking” developed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, which activates the movement between knowledge, history and media, Gagnon will show how the artworks of In Search of Expo 67 are positioned as vital forms of animating the archive and knowing the past in the present.
Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies and a Concordia University Research Fellow. She has published widely on cultural politics, memory, and visual/media arts since the 1980s. Her books include Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002, with Richard Fung), and Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014, with Janine Marchessault). Her media works include the DVD-catalogue and restoration project of her late artist-father’s experimental 1960’s film, Charles Gagnon: 4 Films (2009), and the interactive database Archiving R69 (2011). Currently, she is completing a book exploring posthumous collaborations with filmmakers as a form of creative archiving.
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Exhibition
Graduate Gallery
205 Richmond Street West
Saturday March 10, 2018
Shown in conjunction with the 2018 CADN Graduate Student Conference un-histories: art and the unconcluded, which seeks to seeks to counter history’s containment and to foreground its continuing relevance in the present. Using the notion of “un-histories” to unsettle conventional limits of history by prompting critical inquiries into how history functions, encouraging: re-organizing the composition of the past, re-constructing methods of transmitting narratives,
and destabilizing the seeming linearity of events. Un-histories reimagine history as a practice for addressing the “unconcluded”—subjectivities and narratives previously considered spectral, disparaged, marginalized, erased, shamed, abashed, or localized.
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Artwork on display:
Ukiuktaqtumi, Stephen Puskas, 2017
30:10 minutes, colour
Didactic:
A father picking arctic berries with his daughters on a sunny September day and a group of elders playing dice at a local community centre make up two separable moments bound together by Montreal-based Inuk artist Stephen Agluvak Puskas’s short-film Ukiuktaqtumi (2017). Lyrically stitching together video footage found on the web (each
borrowed with consent from the original videographers), Puskas shapes a wide-ranging view of Inuit life ukiuktaqtumi (“in the North”). In a gesture of endurance, the independent yet woven threads of narrative in Ukiuktaqtumi often begin inside of a moment and unravel without conclusion.
Through these rifts in continuity, Puskas echos the imperative of self-representation for Inuit communities in Canada, whose prolonged subjugation to the colonial lens has fostered inaccurate narratives that call for an unlearning and dismantling of such histories. Ukiuktaqtumi does just this—made in response to non-Inuit filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North (compiled of taken footage that constructed a distorted image of Inuit), Puskas presents a selfdetermined
and consenting outlook of life in the North – full of variance, movement, and (dis)/continuities.
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Artist Bio:
Stephen Agluvak Puskas is co-founder and former producer for Nipivut, Montreal's Inuit community radio show. Selected by the Senate in 2017 as an Indigenous Youth Leader, Stephen works to improve Indigenous representation in media and to shed light on the exploitation of Inuit culture like with Ungava Gin. He volunteers for Dawson College's Indigenous Education Council and has also helped write the Inuit chapter of the Indigenous cultural awareness manual for the SPVM. Stephen's film about Inuit self-representation, Ukiuktaqtumi (OO-KEE-UKTAK-
TOO-MEE) recently won the Prix de la Releve at 2017's Presence Autochtone and he is currently an associate producer at the National Film Board, working on the coastal Labrador project, which aims to support Labrador Inuit in producing documentary films.
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Throughout this exhibition we are encouraging and accepting donations for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami: The National Representational Organization Protecting and Advancing the Rights and Interests of Inuit in Canada.
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami serves as a national voice protecting and advancing the rights and interests of Inuit in Canada, with a stated vision for Canadian Inuit to prosper through unity and self-determination.
More information can be found at : https://itk.ca
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We would also like to thank VTape (http://www.vtape.org) for their assistance in organizing the presentation of this work.
This conference is organized by students in the MA Program in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories at OCAD University. Special thanks is given to the Office of Graduate Studies, the President's Office, the Faculty of Art, and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences/School of Interdisciplinary Studies for their generous support.
Website: https://unhistoriesconference2018.weebly.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/446986352386010/
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/un-histories-art-and-the-unconcluded-tickets-42872521867
Contact: ocadugraduateconference@gmail.com