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Diversions: Detroit-Windsor Conversations on Borders, Traffic and Circulation

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AGW Symposium

March 8-9
Diversions: Detroit-Windsor Conversations on Borders, Traffic and Circulation

Windsor’s urban character has been closely tied to Detroit’s rise and fall. This symposium seeks to change the conversation about borders in the Windsor-Detroit region through inviting prominent artists and researchers to consider the obstacles and mobilities that have emerged in this urban locale.

Friday, March 8, 10:00 am – 5 pm

10am – 10.30 am : Opening Remarks by Catharine Mastin, Director, Art Gallery of Windsor, followed by conference organizers.

10:30 am – 12 pm: Spheres of Circulation
Moderator: Srimoyee Mitra, Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Windsor
Panelists: David J. Taylor, Ali Kazimi, Richard Fung and Natalie Casemajor Loustau

1 pm – 3 pm: Bordered Spaces
Moderator: Lee Rodney, Associate Professor, Media Art Histories & Visual Culture, Director Border Bookmobile Project
Panelists: Janine Marchessult, Justin Langlois, Phil Hofmann and Marcos Ramirez ERRE

3:30 pm – 5 pm: Imagined Geographies
Moderator: Michael Darroch, Assistant Professor, Media Art Histories & Visual Cultures, Director of Interminus Research Group
Panelists: Christopher McNamara, Will Straw, Louis Jacob and Anouk Belanger

Admission to these panel discussions is FREE!

Saturday, March 9 11 am – 5 pm:
Exhibition Tours and Detroit Bus Tour

11 am – 12 pm: Exhibition Tours
Join Srimoyee Mitra for a tour of Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land) and Lee Rodney for a tour of The Border Bookmobile Public Archive and Reading Room. Admission is FREE!

Afternoon: Detroit Bus Tour with Dylan Miner (seats are limited)
Dylan AT Miner is a border-crossing artist, activist, historian, curator and professor.
Admission is $5 for the bus tour; email Nicole McCabe nmccabe@agw.ca for more information.

Complete information on the Diversions Program is available at: http://www.agw.ca/event/583

Art Gallery of Windsor
401 Riverside Drive West
www.agw.ca

 

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Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land)

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With artists Broken City Lab (Canada), Campus in Camps (Palestine), Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi (Pakistan/USA), Willie Doherty (Ireland), Marcos Ramirez Erre(Mexico/USA), Sanaz Mazinani (Canada), Christopher McNamara (Canada/USA), Dylan Miner (USA/Canada), Ed Pien (Canada), Leila Sujir/Maria Lantin (Canada)

Border Cultures is a three-part annual exhibition that brings together regional, national and international artists to examine the complex and shifting notions of national boundaries. It is an exhibition-in-progress, conceptualized as a research-based platform for artists and cultural producers to explore and examine the border through different lenses. Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land) will be followed by Part Two (work, labour) in 2014 and Part Three (security, surveillance) in 2015. In this exhibition artists reimagine the pattern of crisscrossing national boundaries as way to engage in dialogues and share knowledge. With a goal to mobilize and connect the ongoing critical dialogues on national boundaries in Windsor with diverse narratives and experiences of border contexts in different parts of the world.

The exhibition opens on Friday, January 25 at 7pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

Highlights of this exhibition include the Canadian premier of early black and white photographic works by Irish artist Willie Doherty shot in the contested city of Derry, Postcards from the Edge of the Tijuana and San Diego border by Marcos Ramirez Erre, an exchange of best-friend lockets between Detroit and Windsor and a mobile print lab by Métis artist Dylan Miner in collaboration with youth from the Turtle Island Education Centre, Windsor, and much more. The exhibition is curated by Srimoyee Mitra.

Also, our friends…

The Border Bookmobile Public Archive and Reading Room
Organized by Lee Rodney in collaboration with Mike Marcon

This project aims to reposition local history within the context of international borders, chronicling the shifting relationship between the two communities as post-9/11 border policies continue to drive a wedge between them. Over the past three years, the Border Bookmobile traveled throughout Windsor and Detroit as a mobile exhibition and discussion platform and cross-border community archive of books, artist projects, photographs, videos, maps and ephemera about the urban history of Windsor-Detroit and border regions in other parts of the world. At the AGW, the Border Bookmobile will host a series of discussions and workshops with the goal of collecting, organizing and synthesizing knowledge about this border region to contextualize globally, and chronicle, locally, the changing perceptions of the border.

And…

March 8-10, Diversions: Detroit-Windsor Conversations on Borders, Traffic and Circulation, An Experiential Symposium.
Organized by the Art Gallery of Windsor, IN/TERMINUS: Media, Art, and Urban Ecologies (University of Windsor), The Border Bookmobile (Windsor-Detroit) and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (McGill University).
Panellists include artists Marcos Ramirez Erre, Dylan Miner and Christopher McNamara as well as theorists Will Straw, (McGill University) and Janine Marchessault (York University). FREE admission

March 9, 12-1pm, Curator’s tour of Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land)
FREE admission

March 15, 2-4pm: Connections and Disconnections in the Windsor-Detroit Area This is a one day workshop run by Broken City Lab and ArtsCorpsDetroit to arrange an exchange for people without passports in Windsor-Detroit area.
FREE admission

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Regret/Resolve: Exhibition Planning

Yesterday morning Rosina and I went to the Art Gallery of Windsor for the install of BCL’s piece that is going in the Border Cultures: Part One (Homes, Land)  along with some other great artists. The show is opening next week on January 25th.

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We spent the majority of the remainder of day planning for the Regret/Resolve Exhibition that’s happening January 31st at 7:00pm.

_MG_3712(1)Sara, Rosina and myself each took a wall and started pinning the t-shirts in different variations so we could get a sense of what could work in the space.

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Rosina making a second row.

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I decided to go with a more uniform shape, but it seemed to try and “hide” the fact that these were T-shirts.

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Rosina’s more organic approach.

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We almost had a full house which was great for working through our list of to-dos! Kevin, Josh, Sara, Rosina and myself hung out during the day, with Justin joining us at night to add some more input.

Kevin made some great renderings of the space, along with his own creative options of how the exhibition should look.

The most minimalist version.

Another.

Some song lyric manipulations.

We changed our gears and began to focus on the North Bay publication that we have recently begun to work on.

Diligent Joshua and Kevin.

Drawings, printouts, writing, brainstorms.

Rosina takes a stab at a chapter title for the publication: Street Etiquette for Strangers.

Meanwhile at the front of the storefront, Paul Anderson hosted his first Building Electronics Workshop. He had a full house of curious and attentive guests.

Taking notes.

Overall, it was a very fun and productive day!

More soon.

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Some things you should do this week (and next): Art, Lectures, & Funding Workshops

photo courtesy of Windsorite.ca

Thankfully, Owen over at Windsorite.ca grabbed a shot of this (above, our work, AS OF 2011.09.21, WE ARE ALIVE & WELL.), since we still need to schedule a plane ride to get some photos of our own — above, you can see a shot of our work as part of this year’s Windsor Biennial at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

Speaking of the Biennial, there’s an opening this Friday, and it promises to be a huge party with all of Windsor and Detroit’s finest. It starts at 7pm with a curator’s talk with food, drinks, and music running until 10pm.

If you’re looking for something to do ahead of the Biennial opening, you might consider checking out Interminus‘ first guest speaker as part of this year’s lecture series. Dr. Will Straw will be giving a talk on Culture and the Urban Night at Rino’s Kitchen starting at 4:30pm.

And, finally, next week, if you’re in Windsor (or just heading here to attend Homework), we can recommend you check out some FREE Grant Information Sessions on Thursday, October 20th from 6:30pm-9pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor hosted by the Ontario Arts Council‘s own (and our very favourite grant officers), Lisa Wöhrle, Associate Visual Art and Crafts Officer; Loree Lawrence, Community and Multidisciplinary Arts Officer; and Mark Haslam, Media Arts Officer. If you want to attend, RSVP to Martina Roncarelli, Program Assistant, mroncarelli@arts.on.ca, 416-969-7417 or toll-free in Ontario, 1-800-387‑0058, ext. 7417.

Hope to see you around!

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Drifting Around Downtown Windsor: Exploring the City Slowly

We’ve been lucky over the last week or so with some surprisingly agreeable weather. The had humidity lifted and with it, the temperature scaled back considerably. So, it’s been pretty much the best time all summer to do some exploring on foot (and sometimes on bicycle) at a pace that really allows for a different kind of engagement with space.

Now armed with an iPhone 4 for an upcoming project, it’s easier than ever to take pictures on a casual exploration. Something like a dérive, though admittedly a little more aimed at looking for some new potential project spaces than a completely free drift, last night was a perfect time to play with thinking about a variety of spaces, slowly.

These slow explorations really give the time to notice and attempt to unfold the curiosities all around the city. A sign like the one above, “PUBLIC STAIRWELL,” notifies passersby that this space is publicly accessible and annotates something unseen, behind the door. I wonder what else we might be able to annotate with the same authority as this sign that could be suggested as being both public and understood as normally hidden (at least in terms of its use by a public).

Continue reading “Drifting Around Downtown Windsor: Exploring the City Slowly”

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How to Save a City

The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor.

For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events in the Broken City Lab: Save the City series, or perhaps you’ve just read about it here, or maybe you’ve meant to come, but you haven’t been able to fit it into your schedule — in an case, this is going to be our final event as part of the project, and you should come.

The things that we’ve learned from working with the community on creating audio documentaries, city-wide maps, sidewalk-parades, and postcards with hand-written letters have changed the way we think about this city, its past, and its future.

So, we would like to cordially invite you to the final part of Save the City on May 21st at the Art Gallery of Windsor. We’ll be in or around the building depending on the weather, but either way, we promise we won’t be hard to find. We would like you to come out to share with us one more time some of the things that shape the way you think about Windsor — we’ll talk about what we’ve learned, we’ll ask you a bunch of questions, we’ll show you hundreds of photographs, and then we’ll ask you to help us come up with a message that we’ll then put up on a billboard (or two) somewhere in Windsor. We’re hoping that this message can say something to the city that needs to be said.

Hope you can make it.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Exhibition Opening at AGW

Broken City Lab at the Art Gallery of Windsor

There’s an opening for two shows in which I’m participating on Friday, April 17, 2009, 7pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

On the first floor is the University of Windsor MFA Graduate Exhibition, Without, featuring documentation from various Broken City Lab projects alongside work by Steven Leyden Cochrane, and Henrjeta Mece, and on the second floor is the 2009 Windsor Biennial, with a large-scale graph outlining ideas and activities for re-imagining cross-border relations alongside too many other great area artists to name. As part of the Biennial, Broken City Lab will be working in Windsor and Detroit towards the realization of some of these activities throughout May and June (more details to follow).

The shows run from April 10 – June 5 and April 17 – July 5 respectively.