Vancouver author Lee Henderson wrote The Man Game (Viking/Penguin, 2008), The Broken Record Technique (Viking/Penguin, 2002) and his fiction and visual art journalism has been published in numerous journals and magazines. The Man Game has been described as “a portrait of a lost and fanciful city [Vancouver].” The novel is a highly researched, sprawling tale of 19th century frontier-era Vancouver, its inhabitants, wild west politics, racial tension, and a fictional sport known as “the man game.” He is a contributing editor to Border Crossings and Contemporary, and has curated exhibitions in Vancouver and New York. He is the director/curator of Attache Gallery, a portable art gallery that shows emerging artists, and organizes improvised music events.
Berlin based Canadian visual artist Kara Uzelman (b. 1978) is a graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver. Since 2002 she has shown work in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Artspeak, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; Justine M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto; Latitude 53, Edmonton; Sommer & Kohl, Berlin; Pari Nadimi, Toronto and has been highlighted in both national and local publications. Uzelman is also a member of the Vancouver based artist collective Norma. With an educational background based in urban planning, fine arts and archeology, Uzelman has developed process-based, site-specific sculpture and installation works focusing on the rehabilitation of objects and artifacts in her surrounding environment. This process began when she bought entire garage sales and transforming these collections into sculptures, installations, and performance props. In conjunction with a mentorship in Archaeology in 2006, she gathered a team of volunteers to conduct a four-month excavation of her back yard in Vancouver. This informed several exhibitions over the past three years and resulted in a series of performance props, tools, objects and documentary images. Uzelman’s work is based on an interest in the historical and imagined narratives inherent in the objects that surround her.
Artspeak at Subvision, Hamburg
LEE HENDERSON, KARA UZELMAN
August 26–September 6, 2009
Artspeak has been invited to participate in Subvision, an arts event in Hamburg’s HafenCity on the port. From August 26 to September 6, 2009,thirty international artists’ initiatives will present varied artistic efforts and mediation strategies to the public on an undeveloped site that will be temporarily populated by shipping containers. The focus is on the cultural strategies of artist collectives, artist-run spaces, nomadic projects, archives, curatorial, and artistic networks. Traditional forms of cultural activity – art fairs, biennales, and large-scale events – are intentionally confronted here with opposing formats and experimental ways of (re)presentation and distribution. Often, the common element in these heterogeneous, mainly project-related, temporary alliances is a self-organized, collaborative method of working as well as an emphasis on situative intervention. Independent, viral distribution paths and networks develop, under not infrequently precarious production conditions.
As an extension of Artspeak’s OFFSITE activity, Subvision affords an opportunity to extend our programming beyond Vancouver. Artspeak is working with visual artist Kara Uzelman and writer Lee Henderson, and has asked them to collaborate on a site specific, processual project for Subvision. Reflecting Artspeak’s mandate to foster dialogue between contemporary art and writing, this collaboration will operate on a shared interest in both factual and fictional histories to undertake a consideration of the Subvision site (and Hamburg) through a Vancouver lens. Subvision is providing Artspeak with two containers as a site for the collaborative activities between Uzelman and Henderson, as well as to house an archive of Artspeak’s publications. Uzelman and Henderson will work both materially and performatively. One framing device for their project is to consider and map Vancouver onto Hamburg, examining the port cities’ shared attributes. This mapping might manifest in a written (fictional) history, walking tours, installations, excavations, music, and readings.