Performance

The Library Project is an ongoing series of participatory events exploring the body as a source and site of knowledge. Interrogating the strategies of contemporary academic and corporate forms of group knowledge exchange and skill building such as the TED Talk, conference, workshop and lecture, each performance playfully explores personal history, archive and pedagogy. Inspired by the Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai's call to action at the UN, “Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution”, The Library Project seeks to develop a space and platform for knowledge sharing through performative acts.

For CAG, Dragu will host a daytime intensive workshop considering the idea of Multi/Inter/Trans-disciplinary. Alongside this in our visitor resource space/reading room we present the video archive of the five previous iterations at the Bickersteth Library, Hart House, University of Toronto; Richmond Public Library; Kamloops Art Gallery; Your Kontinent: Richmond International Film & Media Arts Festival and Month of Performance Art, Berlin.

Biography

Margaret Dragu works in video, installation, web-based/book-publication and performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices, her performances have been presented in galleries, museums, theatres, nightclubs, libraries, universities and site-specific venues including parks, botanical gardens, and public parade routes across Canada, the United States and Europe. An innovator and pioneer in Canadian art, Dragu was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012.