Stephen Harper said last week that he was “concerned” about Homegrown, a play running at this year’s Summerworks theatre festival in Toronto. Homegrown apparently takes a sympathetic view on one of the ‘Toronto 18’ would-be terrorists who were foiled by Canadian authorities in 2006.
Summerworks, like many artistic endeavors across Canada, receives federal funding. This year, Ottawa gave the festival $35,000. There are over 40 performances at this year’s festival, which means that Homegrown probably received somewhere in the range of $875 from the federal government.
Granted, the concern is probably not just about the money; it’s a principles thing, I guess. Why, one might ask, would Canadian taxpayers support a play that asks us to sympathize with a man who was apparently going to try to blow up federal buildings and kill Canadians?
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This weekend Vancouver’s Under the Volcano Festival of Art and Social Change, held annually at Cates Park in North Vancouver, will celebrate its 20th anniversary and, in the same event, wrap up their long running festival dedicated to celebrating the arts and social activism.
Speaking of the festival to the Westender (which gives a lot of background and context, a good read), the festival’s artistic director Meegan Maultsaid explained: “The most important thing, as a festival, is that we support social activism, that we stand in solidarity with movements and community groups that are fighting and struggling and agitating for change. I don’t think that aspect has been a struggle for us. I think we’ve been able to maintain the popularity of our festival and have it continue to grow while not really participating in corporate culture.”
The festival is organized by a core of 6 people who work year round and do it all unpaid. The team does it ‘as a labour of love’ because they support the work of local activists, community groups, and individuals struggling to find social justice.
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Enter and Exit (2001)
Artist Wu Yuren has been arrested, beaten and is being held in a Beijing jail according to his wife, Canadian Karen Patterson. Patterson decided to make her appeal through the Western media to draw attention to her husband’s plight.
According to the New York Times, despite his being detained, the Chinese government has yet to admit they even have Yuren in their custody.
Last winter Yuren joined other artists in their opposition to urban development in the neighbourhood of Beijing that housed their studios, District 8. The development plan subsequently allowed the seizure of their studios by authorities. Their highly visible protest went past Tiananmen Square, a particularly sensitive region of the city in connection with public demonstrations of dissent.
The Daily Telegraph (one of the UKs largest daily newspapers, owned by real estate billionaires David and Frederick Barclay) reported that the current arrest came about after Yuren – whose studio had been relocated – attended at a local police station to complain about problems with his landlord. After a fractious interaction with the police, he was beaten and detained.
The brutal police response may be linked to the activist histories of Yuren and some of the other artists involved in the original protest against the development plan, many of whom have signed Charter 08, a manifesto demanding a variety of political changes in China including an independent legal system, freedom of association and the elimination of one-party rule. Charter 8 is not so popular with the current administration.
Yuren’s work has been widely appreciated as an element of the most innovative art being produced in China today. In the Imperial Criminal (2001) series, for example, Yuren displays twelve passport-like blue tinted photographs with fluorescent brands stamped on their foreheads to indicate ancient/modern crimes – the brand is exposed when placed under ultra-violet light. In The Sparks Program (10,000 Years Art Exhibition, Oct 2005), seven labourers strike a pile of flint in a dark space for three hours with metal batons, producing a heavy knocking sound with flying sparks – a commentary on the situation of peasant construction workers in Beijing’s real estate boom. And in connection with his resistance to land development, he transformed White Box Museum of Art into a large demolition site. According to ML Art Source (a Beijing-based promotional website for contemporary Chinese art with the self-stated goal of serving as “a platform that will bridge the art to the people and the people to the art”) the controversial nature of Yuren’s installation at the White Box has ensured that there is little information available about it.
It may be that this story is being reported in such high profile mainstream media sites because of his wife Karen Patterson’s Canadian citizenship. For more information and to keep up to date you can follow Karen Patterson’s twitter feed @KPinChina.
Take an art show comprised entirely of works found in the trash, a soapbox derby, countless bands, guerilla theatre interventions, conceptual art pieces, picnics in strange places, video screenings and parades and you get a pretty interesting festival. Remove participation fees, unethical sponsorships, a heavy corporate presence and any form of censorship and replace those negatives with an inclusive community-based approach to the arts and you get the International Infringement Festival.
Created in Montreal in the summer of 2004 and thrown together in just a few months, the festival has managed to survive long enough to enter its seventh year and spread to various communities around the world as varied as Bordeaux, France and Ottawa, sometimes planting roots and continuing. This year, there are four stops on the Infringement circuit: Brooklyn, which already happened in May; Montreal, which gets underway in late June; Hamilton (for the first time) in early July; and Buffalo in the end of July and early August.
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There are those performers who touch us in ways that we never thought we could be touched. Ronnie Burkett with his marionettes is one of those artists – at least for me – a kind of creative genius (if that category of compliment hasn’t been completely discredited) whose work gets under my skin and makes me feel as if elements of my lives are being played out onstage by the freaky little wooden dolls dangling from his fingers.
I say “lives” because Burkett performs his latest with at least a dozen or so different characters, Burkett creating the voices and onstage personas for all of them while also playing himself – or rather, a cruise ship marionette artist in a mid-career / mid-life crisis. A friend who I described the performance to – someone unfamiliar with Burkett’s work – said that it sounded “creepy”, and there is something not just a little crazy about watching a man inhabit so many different personalities in such a compressed and energetic performance.
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Is Anne Coulter a pundit, a performance artist or a baffoon? Une question tres important.
Coulter’s talk at the University of Ottawa on Tuesday this week was canceled. Students who disagree with her particular brand of over-the-top conservative histrionics marched and shouted (I think someone pulled the fire alarm) and, apparently on the advice of her security staff, she withdrew from the show.
So now Coulter is filing a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. She alleges that an e-mail from Ottawa U that asked her to use “restraint, respect and consideration” when speaking, and explained that freedom of speech in Canada is defined differently than in the U.S., makes her the victim of a “hate crime.” Her point is that the email targeted her as a member of an identifiable group and thus was hate speech and a hate crime.
A quick look at the Criminal Code of Canada suggests that hate crime is committed with the intention to intimidate, harm or terrify a group of people who are targeted for who they are and not for anything they have done. Hate crimes involve physical force or threat of physical force against a person, a family or a property; intimidation, harassment.
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I came across a fascinating art project taking place in Windsor, Ontario called the Broken City Lab, an artist collective’s response to the economically and socially plundered remains of yet another post-industrial North American city.
Broken City Lab describes what they do as a mix of social practice, performance, and activism. From the website: “The lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace”. Their goal? To find new and creative solutions to Windsor’s economic and social miasma now that the industrial party has moved on.
Their projects are often technology based, which they use to bring in wider communities of participation. For example, the Talking to Walls intervention projected short fill-in-the-blank questionnaires and statements into public spaces that addressed issues of public and private concern — statements like:
Tear down all the _________ but leave up all the ____________.
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