Opening: Practices in Proximity, September 27

Re(Housing) the American Dream 2020, video still

Opening reception Friday, September 27, 5-8 PM

RSVP here

Exhibition on view from September 10, 2024 – January 17, 2025.

Gallery hours 10 AM-4 PM Tuesday-Thursday or by appointment.

Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education

1010 W 35th Street, Suite 697

Chicago, IL 60609-1401

312.870.6140

info@capechicago.org

About the exhibition

The Practices in Proximity: Learning and Unlearning from Pedagogical Experiences exhibition brings CAPE teaching artists and invited creative practitioners into a dialogue about their pedagogical experiences. The sites, scenes, and social engagement of learning—whether formal, informal, institutional, or autonomous—impact how the artists negotiate collective spaces and their personal creativity. Manifesting in various ways, artistic concern toward teaching and learning is a nuanced experience defined by proximity to others in improvisation and uncertainty. 

Participating artists: Alberto Aguilar, Kayla Anderson, Molly Cranch, Design Studio for Social Intervention, Eseosa Ekiawowo Edebiri, Flor Flores, Katie Giritlian, Kimi Hanauer, Andres Hernandez, Niema Qureshi + Betsy Zacsek, Kirsten Leenaars, Jennifer Mannebach, Jessica Mueller, Timothy David Rey, Emilie Robinson, Greg Ruffing + Brandon Alvendia, Laura Sáenz, Public Collectors, and Gwendolyn Terry.

Curated by media artist, writer and educator Josh Rios.

Exhibition on view from September 10, 2024 – January 17, 2025. Gallery hours 10 AM-4 PM Tuesday-Thursday or by appointment.

Meet the artists and join the exhibition’s exploration of the layered influences of pedagogical environments. Opening reception Friday, September 27, 5-8 PM, RSVP here. 

Read the exhibition’s press release here.

Stay tuned for monthly public programs!

https://capechicago.org/event/practices-in-proximity/#:~:text=About%20the%20exhibition,dialogue%20about%20their%20pedagogical%20experiences.

Online Panel Discussion: Documentary as Social Practice

Above: Artists L to R: Kirsten Leenaars, Marie-Kristine Petiquay

Saturday, January 27, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Register for event here

Richmond Art Gallery

https://www.richmondartgallery.org/

Curator Zoë Chan moderates a panel discussion with featured artists Kirsten Leenaars and Marie-Kristine Petiquay of Wapikoni Mobile to discuss their use of documentary video to present personal, political and social concerns of a community. The panel will focus on issues that documentary raises about the politics of representation and opportunities it provides for new forms of social practice.

This event will include time for Q+A by participants to join in the live-streamed conversation.

Session Format:

• Live-streamed on the Zoom platform. Registration is required to participate.

• Live automated English captions provided by the Zoom app.

• Q+A feature open for participants to send their questions and comments to panelists.

About the Artists:

Kirsten Leenaars is an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through shared authorship, staging, and improvisation. Leenaars’ work has been shown internationally at venues including The Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Printed Matter, Inc., New York; the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She currently is a Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Marie-Kristine Petiquay is an Atikamekw from the community of Manawan. A multidisciplinary artist, she also participated in the writing, composition and recording of a song for the album “Nos Forêts Chantées”, in addition to performing it twice at the Présences Autochtones festival and the Kwe! Encountering Indigenous Peoples in the summer of 2017. Her photographs have also been exhibited in several group shows. She is co-writer of the feature documentary The Invisible Wall (2020), for which she received a nomination at the 36th Gemini Awards in the category of Best Screenplay: Documentary – Broadcast. She also won the Francophone development grant awarded by the NFB, as part of the Talent Lab of the Rencontres internationales du documentaire à Montréal, for the production of her first feature film Aniskenamakewin.

Wapikoni Mobile’s mission is to promote the expression of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people through film and music creation and the dissemination of these works. By offering Indigenous talent one-on-one support and mentoring, our organization contributes to their personal, professional, and creative development while respecting their narrative sovereignty. Wapikoni provides these artists with a distribution service to disseminate their works across Canada and the world, promoting knowledge and building awareness about First Peoples’ realities. Since 2004, Wapikoni has collected more than 1400 short films and 900 musical pieces, visited 45 communities and 36 nations in Canada and abroad, won more than 220 awards and mentions, and demonstrated a strong presence at hundreds of festivals and events.

https://www.richmondartgallery.org/social-practice

Opening: Let the real world in, Richmond Art Gallery

(Re)Housing the American Dream: A Message from The Future, 2017, video still

LET THE REAL WORLD IN

January 20 - March 31, 2024

Kirsten Leenaars, Yaimel López Zaldívar, Yoshua Okón, Wapikoni Mobile

OPENING: January 20 2-4 pm

Richmond Art Gallery

7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond, BC  V6Y 1R8

Canada Line Station: Richmond-Brighouse

https://www.richmondartgallery.org/

“I take stuff from real life to make something I call a film,”—filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard thus encapsulated his approach. For Godard, the intersection of film and life was an absolute imperative; he insisted that “film should bear witness to the period.”* At times, this meant that he captured the feeling of everyday life by shooting an impromptu dance scene vérité style in a bar without informing any of the clientele. Other times his stance was more overtly political, where he would feature footage of the Black Panthers or show characters reading from revolutionary texts in his films. Sometimes, this desire went beyond the confines of the film itself, spilling over into his own life. During the upheavals of 1968 for instance, he and other directors of the day criticized the Cannes Film Festival for forging ahead with this iconic annual celebration of cinema in the face of student and worker protests across France; the following day, the Festival was shut down.

This persuasive, sometimes polemical appeal to “take stuff from real life” and to “bear witness to the period” of the present day resonates especially with the practices of artists inspired by aspects of documentary traditions. This is the case with Let the real world in, where a documentary impulse runs through a varied selection of videos. Created by Kirsten Leenaars, Yoshua Okón, Wapikoni Mobile, and their subject-collaborators, these videos also share a centring on children and youth.

Young people have long been associated with such qualities as spontaneity and simplicity, authenticity and unpretentiousness, innocence and ingenuity. Indeed in North American society, it is common to attempt to preserve these qualities as long as possible by endeavouring to protect young people from difficult realities. (Certainly, this is a privileged position that not everyone has the luxury of embracing.) In the same vein, children and youth are not always consulted on relevant topics considered beyond the limits of their understanding. In contrast, the videos featured in Let the real world in take seriously young people’s perspectives, ideas, and experiences of the world around them, vividly foregrounding their agency.

Let the real world in also features a commissioned series of screenprints by local artist and graphic designer Yaimel López Zaldívar, created in response to the videos in this exhibition. Educated in Habana, López Zaldívar draws from Cuba’s rich tradition of cultural, social, and political posters from the 1960s to the 1980s. Experimenting with text and image, López Zaldívar brings his vibrant artisanal aesthetic to the exhibition.

*Quoted in Florence Platarets, Godard par Godard, 2023 (film).

https://www.richmondartgallery.org/let-the-real-world-in