Opening Celebration
Enchantment: Opening Celebration
24 October 2024
5:00-8:00pm
Rebecca Bair, Because They Were There, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Please join us for the opening celebration of Enchantment featuring Rebecca Bair, Julian 伊 中 Hou and Byron Peters, guest curated by Phanuel Antwi.
Enchantment is a group exhibition that looks at the way that Chinatown-Downtown Eastside (and Vancouver in general) enchants international capital, investors, and tourists. Rebecca Bair, Julian 伊 中 Hou and Byron Peters insist upon a counter enchantment. To these artists, this counter enchantment comes from reworking archival materials, to insisting on the lived experience of having relations in this neighbourhood, to mobilizing speculation, and fiction, to listening to the knowledge of the surrounding communities. In a political sense, there is a degentrification of enchantment at work in this group show, and the artists invite us to reclaim the means of enchantment. Through sculpture, sound installation, and video poetry, these newly commissioned works remain alive to the ready-made imaginings of this space at the same time that they rework the knotty ties that secure the image of this place.
Enchantment is presented with additional support from The Studio for Racial and Colonial Tidalectics (Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies).
With Support From
Participant Bios
Rebecca Bair
Rebecca Bair is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. Her research aims to explore the possibilities of specific representation and of identity through abstraction and non-figuration. Bair uses multimedia approaches and Sun collaborations to illustrate her exploration of identity and intersectionality, through the lens of her own experience as a Black Woman on Turtle Island. Her artistic, professional and educational goals revolve around common themes of celebrating Black plurality, as well as enabling interpersonal and intercultural care, and her work acts as a vehicle through which the complexities of history and identity can be uncovered, redefined and expressed.
Julian 伊 中 Hou
Julian 伊 中 Hou is an artist based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. His multidisciplinary practice includes the fostering and organizing of productions through a fluid collaborative art, audio, publishing and apparel entity (Second Spring), as well as an ongoing artistic practice that involves the accumulation of new skills and application of personal symbolic invocations, collective meaning, and original methods of divination that probe the darker recesses of psychic awareness. His stalwart mediums are drawing, sculpture, songwriting, album production, and clothing as art.
Byron Peters
Byron Peters is an artist and filmmaker based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. Often through long-term collaborations, their work engages with collective labour practices, digitality and racial capitalism, community archives, and histories of science. Since 2018, Byron collaborated with the late activist and community television producer Sid Chow Tan towards archive-based films that weave together questions of racial justice, mathematics, mythologies, and histories of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, including the forthcoming The Search for Kwan Kung Pt. II.
Phanuel Antwi
Phanuel Antwi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC. In 2022 he was named Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He is an artist, curator, and organiser concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy and struggle.