What’s at Stake?

World Art Centre at Simon Fraser University, 149 West Hastings Street, downtown Vancouver

What’s At Stake? Intertextual Indigenous Knowledges is an afternoon of talks, discussions and a spoken word performance that examines knowledge, power, authority, and sovereignty in the construction of artistic practices.

Presentation House Gallery is pleased to be a participant in this forum that marks the culmination of a unique collaboration with galleries across the city: Intertextual: Art in Dialogue, a roving reading group held at participating galleries over the last year.

Free and open to everyone, What’s at Stake? is designed to inspire a web of timely ideas and urgent questions. Taking the critical historiography of Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A Changing History of Ideas (UBC Press, 2013) as a point of provocation, this program belongs to critical discussions about the powerful role of art institutions and written texts in defining Indigenous artistic practices. The afternoon aims to examine and offer lively debates about the processes of selection and concomitant erasure that occur in cultural representations.

Beginning with a welcome by Musqueam artist and knowledge keeper Debra Sparrow and concluding with a spoken word performance by Nuu-chah-nulth/Kwakwaka’wakw poet Valeen Jules, the afternoon features talks by notable cultural figures involved in Indigenous art: art historian Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Nuu-chah-nulth historian, poet and artist Ron Hamilton (Ḳi-ḳe-in), Kwakwaka’wakw artist, activist and scholar Marianne Nicolson, and Cree curator and scholar Richard Hill, Canada Research Chair at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In addition, a lively discussion between Vancouver Indigenous scholars, curators and artists – Lindsay Lachance, Jordan Wilson, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Jennifer Kramer – promises to be a highlight.

This series has been produced with the participation of SFU Galleries, Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, Contemporary Art Gallery, grunt gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology, Presentation House Gallery, UBC Press, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Western Front.