Or Gallery is pleased to present a talk by artist Cathy Busby, the second installment in our Curating the Self lecture series.

Busby will revisit the period when she first began exploring the politics of pain and its relief, and then consider how this theme has informed her more recent works. This early period of inquiry led to projects including her Self-Help Book Library (1994), the exhibition Where Does It Hurt? (1996) and culminated in a book she co-edited with Bill Burns and Kim Sawchuk entitled When Pain Strikes (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Early in the new millennium I began tracking public apologies in the news made by CEOs, sports stars and politicians. This became source material for a series of prints, installations and bookworks entitled Sorry. During this time the momentous, long-awaited apologies by federal governments were made to Aboriginal people for residential schools in Canada and the ‘Stolen Generations’ in Australia (2008). I felt their commemoration was important, especially in light of the assertion by Justice Murray Sinclair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that “We’re all in this together.” I made several iterations of We Are Sorry, temporary public monuments in Canada and Australia, as well as installations and bookworks (2008-16).

Still expanding ideas about pain relief, I undertook the project Steve’s Vinyl which led me to think about belongings, mourning, community and personal history. For many years I had kept the nearly 200 record albums my late brother Steve left me when he died of AIDS-related illness. I neither played nor looked at them. It gradually occurred to me to create an installation and performance giveaway event. A book documenting this event followed (Steve’s Vinyl, Emily Carr University Press + Visual AIDS New York, 2013).

Curating the Self is a lecture series that explores the construction of identity in relation to the discipline of curating as well as the many forms of cultural assemblage that have lately begun to appropriate and adapt curatorial strategies for their own purposes.

Thanks to TRB for the title and the Chronicle Herald, Halifax.