| Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures is the first exhibition
to be staged in MOA’s new Audain Gallery. It provides an evocative
illustration of the use of diverse media and art approaches to express
and engage with the 'realities' that surround us and to challenge the
ways in which cultural and national identities are reproduced. The artists
examine our acceptance of the borders that delineate our neatly categorized
world: those that separate the secular and the sacred, the local and the
global, the traditional and the contemporary, the remembered and the forgotten.
Yet the necessity of borders as protection is also affirmed.
Through a disturbance of our everyday categories—the central role
of
anthropology as I understand it—we question our most closely held
ideas
about the world. In so doing we open up the possibility of alternative
ideas and multiple understandings. To 'disturb' means to act on something,
to move or re-position it, and at the same time to destabilize an accepted
truism and the emotional charge that such a destabilization can cause.
Isn't the whole of 20th-century critical theory based on the notion of
disturbance? Some perhaps would argue it is at the very heart of contemporary
philosophy.
Border Zones is the first in MOA's new program of bold, engaging,
and sometimes disturbing future exhibitions that will explore themes such
as cultural encounters, contemporary issues, and First Nations, Asian,
and other world arts and cultures. Whether the subject is new or part
of a well established genre within museum repertoires, MOA will always
strive to include perspectives that will provide a distinctive signature
to Canada's new contemporary museum of world arts and cultures.
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