Germaine Koh – AHVA Koerner Artist in Residence 2021

The Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) at the University of British Columbia is pleased to announce Germaine Koh as the Koerner Artist in Residence, from January to December 2021. During her residency, Koh will be working out of a studio in Audain Art Centre, in addition to conducting studio visits, appearing as a guest speaker in graduate and undergraduate courses, and will present a public research lecture. Germaine hopes to organize playful, hands-on, and physically distanced activities to create opportunities for safe connection, exchange, and experimentation amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“These opportunities for experiential learning might be seen as an extension of the approach I took in VISA 360 which I taught this past fall; based on ground-level experimentation within different types of public space,” says Koh. “My art practice is based in making and D.I.Y. experimentation across quite diverse disciplines, and I intend to bring to the position an attitude of trying and playing, by experimenting with materials and equipment in the workshops and by connecting with other research areas of the university.”

Germaine Koh is an internationally active artist and curator based in Vancouver, on the ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. From 2018 to 2020 she was the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence.

Koh’s work adapts familiar objects to create situations that look at the significance of everyday actions and common spaces, and which encourage connections between people, technology, and natural systems. Her current projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice.

Her work has been exhibited at the BALTIC Centre, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Para/Site Art Space, Frankfurter Kunstverein, The Power Plant, The British Museum, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Plug In ICA, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Liverpool, Sydney and Montreal biennials. She has received the Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award and been shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award.

The Koerner Artist in Residence Program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is made possible by the generous support of the Koerner Foundation and a private BC-based foundation. Past Koerner Artists in Residence were Marianne Nicolson and Stan Douglas.