46th Annual University of British Columbia, Art History, Visual Art and Theory Graduate Symposium Exhibition
MakeShift: handmade, homemade, and remade productions
Keynote presentation by Olumoroti (Moroti) Soji-George “Exquisite Corpse” – 5:00 pm| Audain Art Centre, Room 1002
Exhibition Opening
Thursday, March 2, 2023
6:30 – 8:00 pm
AHVA Gallery
Audain Art Centre
6398 University Blvd
Exhibition runs
March 2–31, 2023
Monday–Friday
12–4 PM
Artists:
Gwenyth Chao
Alex Gibson
Elycia SFA
Maddie Alexander
Francisco Berlanga
Par Nair
Danica Drago
Douglas Watt
Kittie Cooper
Melissa Armstrong
The 46th Annual UBC AHVA Symposium and Exhibition Committee presents MakeShift: handmade, homemade, and remade productions, a processing of collectively shared anxieties about the rise of visualizations generated with artificial intelligence technology and various automated messaging systems. Co-chaired by graduate students Morgan Sears-Williams, Maya Rodrigo-Abdi, Laney Agodon, and Gulmehar Dhillon, this year’s event proposes a material-focused and making-oriented shift in the ways in which we engage with art. MakeShift will make space for further dialogue concerning artistic practices that work to resist commodification, gendered divisions of labour, and other/ed objects found in our materialist dialectic.
The exhibition opening will be preceded by a keynote presentation from curator and educator Olumoroti (Moroti) Soji-George (Black Arts Centre, Gallery Gachet) on Thursday, March 2, at 5PM in Room 1002. Through his presentation, entitled Exquisite Corpse, Soji-George will uncover the emergence and significance of new approaches to Black cultural production. Soji-George believes that Black bodies are constantly refusing, resisting, and creating. Therefore, he aims to address how institutions can grow to support and foster Black artistic emergence. Even further, he will raise questions on what the institution cannot hold. This presentation will draw inspiration from Kerry James Marshall’s recent body of work, Exquisite Corpse: This is not a Game (2022), and the concept of refusal as an artistic praxis and aesthetic, as indicated in the works of Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. Thank you to the additional support of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Museum of Anthropology, Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic, School of Information, Department of Asian Studies, Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, Department of Anthropology, Centre for European Studies, and Department of History.
