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What kinds of cultural borders do we experience in the world today? How and why are these boundaries made—and crossed?
Contemporary art is increasingly significant as a site where cultural
differences and values are both produced and contested. At the same time,
MOA, as an anthropological museum located on traditional Musqueam territory,
is involved in a critical re-thinking of the relationships and boundaries
among cultural institutions, originating communities, knowledge systems,
and collections of art and ethnology.
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Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems
genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions,
societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?
Edward Said
Orientalism (1978)
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In this exhibition, twelve artists look at the idea of borders: not
only as lines that divide, but also as spaces of encounter and exchange,
protection and exclusion, migration and memory. These are uncertain spaces,
where our understandings of identity and place may be strengthened or
transformed—and where new narratives are being created as cultural
and geographical borders diverge and collide.
The artists raise questions that ask us to look more closely at the border
zones within and among communities, institutions, and art forms. They
direct our eyes to histories both visible and unrecorded. And they allow
us to experience community voices, ritual, sculpture, and new media on
a shared terrain, as contemporary cultural practice.
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What really matters [is]… whether we can build new
understandings of what it means to be human in the twenty-first
century. It isn’t about us talking and you listening, it’s
about an engagement that moves our collective understanding forward.
Paul Chaat Smith
Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong (2009)
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This exhibition invites us all to step into the border zones of our own lives, and consider the possibilities of cross-cultural translation in an increasingly connected world.
Karen Duffek
Curator, Contemporary Visual Arts
Participating artists: Gu Xiong, Hayati Mokhtar, Tania Mouraud, Marianne
Nicolson, Edward Poitras, Rosanna Raymond, Dain Iskandar Said, Thamotharampillai
Shanaathanan, Prabakar Visvanath, Laura Wee Láy Láq, John Wynne, and Ron
Yunkaporta
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