Madiha Aijaz

Zarmeene Shah

*Memorial for the lost pages* presents the intimate videos and photographs of Madiha Aijaz, bringing together the artist’s works in Canada for the first time. Aijaz was based in Karachi, Pakistan, and her work is as complex and layered as the city in which she lived, addressing issues of language and identity, longing and loss, public space and colonial legacies. Her videos explore Karachi’s historic and mostly deserted public libraries. Alongside these works are a series of photographs that examine tensions between awaking desire and admissible sexuality in, as Aijaz described, “contested, often fractured landscapes.” Offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, another photographic series describes the country’s most famous rail line, the Khyber Mail. Together, Aijaz’s photographs and videos call attention to shared spaces that are seemingly peripheral to contemporary life. They languish from a neglect that threatens their continued existence. Yet, as the artist’s steadfast and often tender camerawork suggests, these spaces persist. 

Co-curated by Kimberly Phillips and Zarmeene Shah

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival. Work at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program, InTransit BC.


### Biographies

Madiha Aijaz was a filmmaker and photographer based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her book on Hindu temples, *Call to Conscience*, was published in 2014. Recent exhibitions include the Karachi Biennale, Pakistan (2017); 10th International Documentary & Short Film Festival of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India (2017); IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival, New Delhi (2015); and Urban Flux Film Festival, Johannesburg (2012). Aijaz was an Assistant Professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and received an MFA in Photography from Parsons with a Fulbright Scholarship.

Zarmeene Shah is an independent curator and critic currently based in Karachi, Pakistan. Focusing on contemporary art and continental and semiotic theory, she is particularly interested in new media, the body, and the political in art. Shah attained an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture in Karachi, followed by an MA in Critical & Curatorial Studies from Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar (2010). She was Curator-at-Large for the Karachi Biennale in 2017, and also currently serves as Head of the Liberal Arts Program at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture.


ProgramGuideSummer2020.pdf

ExhibitionGuideMadihaAijaz.pdf

A photograph of a train employee in a train vestibule. They wear a green uniform with gold insignia and a grey wool hat. They look down, away from the camera, while light from a window glows behind. 

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001 HEADER - Aijaz.jpg

Seven framed photographs and two monitors hang on two gallery walls. The left wall has two monitors and three photographs, the right wall has four photographs. Two benches sit in front.

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Four framed photographs and two monitors hang on two walls. The left wall has one photograph and the right wall has three photographs and two monitors. One bench sits in the middle of the room.

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Four framed photographs and one monitor hang on two walls. On the left wall there are four framed photographs, on the right wall there is one monitor. Two benches sit in the middle of the room.

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Four framed photographs hang horizontally on the wall of the gallery. Three photographs are grouped together on the right, the fourth sits alone on the left. The frames of the photographs are white.

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Memorial for the lost pages

Althea Thauberger

The Capri Theatre of Karachi, Pakistan is the site and subject of Althea Thauberger’s video work, *Pagal Pagal Pagal Pagal Filmy Duniya [Mad Mad Mad Mad Filmy World]* (2017). Thauberger recognized a complex knot of histories, social relations and power dynamics in the Capri. Built in 1968, the theatre embodied Pakistan’s “golden age” of cinema, and through the late 1970s and 1980s, withstood religious and political shifts decrying the “deviance” of the movies. Today, with an accessible 200-rupee ticket price in the lower seats, the theatre remains open to almost anyone who desires to see a film. Thauberger’s methodology involves developing projects through a process of engagement with the communities of her chosen sites. For *Pagal*, she worked collaboratively and experimentally with a large group of participant-actors who shaped the film for themselves, imaginatively describing a world in the cinema, created by the unruly, heterogenous group of people that make up its audience. *Pagal* asks us to think differently about the complexity of space and invites us to consider the tenuousness of any community. 

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival, with additional support from Clark’s Audio Visual.

*Pagal Pagal Pagal Pagal Filmy Duniya* is coproduced by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Musagetes, Guelph; and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, with additional support from the Karachi Biennale, Shanitha Kachan and Gerald Sheff, Ann and Harry Malcolmson, Carol Weinbaum and Carlos Yep.


### Biography

Through photography, film, video and performance, Althea Thauberger’s art practice is primarily concerned with the collaborative possibilities of the social documentary form. Her recent projects involve an extended engagement with the sites of their production in order to trace broader social and ideological histories. These sites include the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, Czech Republic; the former Rikard Benčić Factory in Rijeka, Croatia; the image holdings of the former National Film Board Still Image Division, now at the National Gallery of Canada; and the Capri Cinema in Saddar, Karachi, Pakistan. Her screenings and exhibitions include the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2019); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018); Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2018); the inaugural Karachi Biennale (2017); the 2012 Liverpool Biennale; the 17th Biennale of Sydney; La musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017); The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); Manifesta 7 (2008); The Berkeley Art Museum (2007); BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2007), among many others. Thauberger is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto.



ExhibitionGuideAltheaThauberger.pdf

A black and white image of 7 people standing on the steps and landings of a u-shaped staircase inside of a building. Each person is looking directly at the camera. 

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Wooden bleachers with three levels, face towards a large projector screen. The screen shows an image of a stage with big red curtains. A person stands in the middle of the stage with a spotlight. 

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Wooden bleachers with three levels, face towards a large projector screen in a dimly lit gallery. The screen shows an image of children sitting in a room. 

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Wooden bleachers pointed towards a large projector screen in a dimly lit gallery. The screen shows a close up image of a person's face with subtitles below.

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An angled view of a projector screen showing an image of a group of people standing, one is holding a phone. The subtitles read: “You get attached. There are somethings people just get attached to.”

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Pagal Pagal Pagal Pagal Filmy Duniya

Julian Yi-Zhong Hou

Julian Hou’s practice is expansive and roving. He draws from a rich field of influences: contemporary psychedelia and diverse spiritual traditions, various musical and architectural vernaculars, Orientalist motifs, along with deep memories (and misrememberings) from his own diasporic childhood. *Grass Drama*, Hou’s first solo exhibition in a major public gallery, manifests as a vinyl record, a one-night performance and a suite of printed patterns hung in the gallery’s façade. Developed out of a two-year sensitivity training undertaken by Hou, involving practices from divination to expanded states of consciousness, *Grass Drama*’s creation was foretold by a Thoth tarot card reading and informs its narrative structure. These cards share a history with Chinese playing cards and early 20th-century Western spiritual philosophy, Hermetic Thelemism, which in turn has connections to Buddhism. In *Grass Drama*, Hou both connects and proposes a means of bridging discontinuities while considering notions of site, context, politics, history and personal references. The works ask those who experience them to discard conventional, waking logic and allow affinities between unlikely things to find one another. 

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare

### Biography

Julian Yi-Zhong Hou was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory, and currently lives in Vancouver, on the land of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. His work has been the focus of solo and group exhibitions at Soon.tw, Toronto; 8-eleven, Toronto; Artspeak, Vancouver; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. His most recent work, *Grass Drama*, has been shown in parts at Cassandra Cassandra, Toronto (2019); Unit 17, Vancouver (2018); and in Charcuterie 4 (2018), and is a spin-off of an ongoing collaborative work with Tiziana La Melia titled *Cloudcuckooville*. Further parts will be exhibited this year at Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver. Hou holds a Bachelor of Arts in Arts and Cultural Studies from Simon Fraser University and a Masters in Architecture from the University of British Columbia. He has held residencies at Triangle, Marseilles; Western Front and 221A, Vancouver and in 2017 won the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Award for Emerging Visual Artist. He is one of the founding members of the record label *Second Spring*.


ExhibitionGuideJulianYi-ZhongHou.pdf

A patterned print. The pattern has a green background; is made of rows of pink and blue diamond-like shapes. The blue shapes have a yellow rope-like shape in the middle. White lines connect each row.

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Exterior of the Contemporary Art Gallery displaying the work of Julian Yi-Zhong Hou. Uniquely patterned paper hangs from the street level windows. Colours of pink, green, purple and yellow are prominent.

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01-JulianYiJongHou-2020.jpg

Exterior of the Contemporary Art Gallery displaying the work of Julian Yi-Zhong Hou. Boldly patterned paper prints hang from the street level windows. Colours of pink, green, purple and yellow are prominent.

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Exterior of the Contemporary Art Gallery displaying the work of Julian Yi-Zhong Hou. Two windows displaying two types of boldly patterned paper. 

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Close up shot of paper prints displayed in a window by the artist Julian Yi-Zhong Hou. The paper is salmon pink with distinct illustrations patterned throughout.

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Close up shot of paper prints displayed in a window by the artist Julian Yi-Zhong Hou. The paper is boldly patterned with colours of green, orange, purple and blue. Two seashells sit on the window sill.

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Grass Drama

Erica Stocking

Brady Cranfield

Damla Tamer

Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley)

Maura Doyle

Claire Greenshaw

Justine A. Chambers

Steven Brekelmans

Annie MacDonell

*The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom* is a group exhibition that challenges assumptions shaped by our patriarchal, capitalist society about where and by what means “serious” artwork gets produced. The exhibition shares the perspectives of ten Canada-based artists whose practices are attentive to these assumptions, and to the very real temporal, spatial and monetary constraints that bind and shape their work.

Their contributions to the show address a multitude of labours — whether physical, emotional, reproductive or otherwise — that are often inextricable from artistic production. Some question myths of the studio and the “magical” labour of the artist. Others explore unconventional models of authorship, including the entanglement of childcare and creative work. Each, in different ways, asks how we navigate (or resist) our artistic and political inheritances, and how we might seek out alternate role models and alliances through which to better strengthen our creative communities.

Together, the works in *The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom* assert the generative potential of these other spaces and cadences of creation, addressing artists’ feelings of distraction and constraints, and call for acknowledgement of and solidarity in different ways of being —a nd making art — in the world.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

CAG acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts towards artists' travel.

ProgramGuideWinter2020.pdf

ExhibitionGuideTheArtistsStudio.pdf

BibliographyTheArtistsStudio.pdf

An image of a stage set framed by theatre curtains with brown curtains in the background. On stage is a set of a bedroom containing a bed, carpets, a small table, a room divider, and lounge chair. 

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001 HEADER - Artist_s Studio.jpg

A stack of prints on pink paper sits on top of a white plinth. The prints are of handwritten notes scrawled across the page. 

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Ten ceramic sculptures of various shaped bottles sit on top of a long rectangular plinth. Behind the plinth, a large black and white painting hangs and another sculpture on a tall plinth to the right.

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Two framed drawings on paper hanging on a gallery wall. The one to the right side is larger with blue markings, and the one on the right side is smaller with pink markings.

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Sand is piled against a V-shaped plinth on a gallery floor. Lining the top of the plinth are small colourful sculptures. Behind a large black & white vinyl print of a photo collage hangs on the wall. 

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Three woven, rectangular artworks hang horizontally on the wall. The weavings are made of white paper printed with black marks. 

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A ceramic bowl, wooden sculpture and two colourful glass lampshades sit on a three tier plinth made out of light wood.

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Large blue text on the wall of a gallery space that reads “I’M WORKING BUT I’M NOT WORKING FOR YOU.”

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A TV monitor hangs on the wall with a pair of headphones hanging beside it to the left. There is a wooden stool in front of the monitor. The video  on the screen shows four hands holding each other.  

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In the center of a gallery are mattresses piled with pillows. Behind a curtain with a printed photo of a bedroom stage set hangs from the ceiling and a large stuffed animal bunny lies on the floor. 

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Steven Brekelmans, Justine A. Chambers, Brady Cranfield, Maura Doyle, Claire Greenshaw, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley), Annie MacDonell, Erica Stocking, Damla Tamer