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  • Rob Brownie

    Rob Brownie is a teacher and writer with a degree in urban geography and philosophy from the University of Victoria. He has co-written articles for Artspeak, West Coast Line and Vancouver Matters (Vancouver: Blueimprint, 2008) with Annabel Vaughan on themes related to the cultural interface of art and architecture in Vancouver.

  • Kim Collier

    Kim Collier is a director/creator/actor living in Vancouver. For the past twelve years, she has been the co-artistic director of Electric Company Theatre, a creation based ensemble, and has directed almost all of their productions, ranging from smaller installation performance works to large-scale visually driven theatre pieces and a film for CBC Opening Night.

  • Kate Fowle

    Kate Fowle is the Executive Director of iCI in New York. She was International Curator for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing from 2007 to 2008, the Chair of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco from 2002 to 2007, and co-director of smith + fowle, a curatorial partnership based in London, from 1996. Her essays have appeared in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, ed. Ted Purves (New York: SUNY Press, 2005) and Cautionary Tales, ed. Steve Rand (New York: Apex Art, 2007). Fowle has also written for numerous magazines, including Parkett, Modern Painters, Manifesta Journal, and Frieze.

  • Ruba Katrib

    Ruba Katrib is the Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami and an Adjunct Professor at the New World School of the Visual Arts in Miami. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. Recent curatorial projects include two group exhibitions—Dark Continents and The Possibility of an Island—at MOCA in 2008. Katrib is currently curating Convention, an exhibition at MOCA about fairs, festivals, and other social and professional gatherings.

  • Melanie O’Brian

    Director/Curator of Artspeak 2004–2010.

  • Lani Russwurm

    Lani Russwurm holds degrees in political science and history from Simon Fraser University and is currently writing a book on policing Vancouver in the interwar period. He procrastinates by researching, writing, and consulting on the history of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he has lived with his daughter since 2002.

  • Althea Thauberger

    Althea Thauberger is an artist based in Vancouver. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves collaboration with a group or community that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books. Thauberger gravitates towards social enclaves—groups of people who exist or develop in some form of seclusion and are often perpetuated by social controls—that are both coercive and voluntary. Her work provides constraints for her subjects to work within which may echo the ones they live within. These may be structural imperatives or conventions of particular film or photographic media, allegory, seriality, or other containers. Thauberger’s performances have involved diverse groups including young Canadian female singer/songwriters, U.S. military wives, Canadian tree planters, Vancouver-based reserve soldiers, and male youth in the German civil service. These amateur performers express concepts of self-definition, alienation, and community through their stories.

    Thauberger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work has been presented at Manifesta 7, Trento, Itlay; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2008; Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008; BAK, Utrecht, 2007; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2006; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, 2006; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, 2006; Singapore History Museum, 2006; Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, 2005; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, 2005; Berkeley Art Museum, 2005; Insite, San Diego/Tijuana, 2005; White Columns, New York, 2004; and Seattle Art Museum, 2004. In 2008 she will be traveling to the Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar, Afghanistan to work on a collaborative photograph with military members there. She has upcoming projects with BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands, the Gaungzhou Triennial, China and Artspeak in Vancouver.

  • Annabel Vaughan

    Annabel Vaughan is an intern architect working in Vancouver. She is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. Her practice works to understand how Vancouver has come to be the city it is, where it is headed in the future, and how the culture of art and architecture will affect the outcome. She has co-written articles for Artspeak, West Coast Line, and Vancouver Matters (Vancouver: Blueimprint, 2008) with Rob Brownie.

  • Jonathan Young

    Jonathan Young is an actor, playwright, and current Artistic Director of Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver. He has performed in theatres across Canada, including the National Arts Centre, Centaur Theatre, the Citadel, Vancouver Playhouse, and the Belfry Theatre. The Electric Company has been producing original live theatre since 1996 and has toured across Canada, to Scotland and the United States. The company is currently working on a large-scale film/theatre hybrid for Vancouver’s Stanley Theatre.

  • Jerry Zaslove

    Jerry Zaslove is a writer and teacher living in Vancouver. He taught literature, humanities, and the social history of art at Simon Fraser University for many years. His recent work includes a gallery installation on Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, diverse essays on the city in history, the university as a failed institution, anarchism and the city, photography, and memory.

Talks & Events

  • Carrall Street Publication and Edition Launch

    ALTHEA THAUBERGER
    September 30, 2009

    Join us for the launch of Althea Thauberger’s catalogue in conjunction with her Artspeak event Carrall Street.

  • Carrall Street Public Forum

    ALTHEA THAUBERGER
    October 2, 2008

    This public forum will provide an opportunity for further community engagement and critical discussion around the social, political and artistic questions raised by Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street. An open conversation will be initiated by a diverse body of speakers that include local architect and activist Annabel Vaughan, founding Simon Fraser University faculty member and writer Jerry Zaslove and Miami based writer and curator Ruba Katrib.

    Join us for this compelling discussion at 7pm on Thursday, October 2nd at 33 West Cordova, Vancouver.

  • Carrall Street

    ALTHEA THAUBERGER
    September 30, 2008

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    8-11pm in the 200 block of Carrall Street

    Althea Thauberger’s site-specific performance work will take place on the 200 block of Carrall Street in front of Artspeak. Collaborating with diverse local communities in Artspeak’s neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside/Gastown, the one-night performance will present the street (brightly lit like a film set at nighttime) as a stage where the roles of participant and spectator blur. The interweaving of organized performers, passersby and audience members will allow for unforeseen interactions to take place, resulting in a destabilized form of community theatre that reveals something of the street’s history, its current successes and stresses, as well as its future.

Publications

Carrall Street

Carrall front
Carrall spine
Carrall back

Title: Carrall Street
Category: Artist Book
Artist: Althea Thauberger
Writers: Jerry Zaslove, Rob Brownie & Annabel Vaughan, Jonathan Young & Kim Collier, Lani Russwurm, Ruba Katrib, Kate Fowle
Editor: Melanie O’Brian
Design: Hodgkinson Design
Publisher: Artspeak
Printer: Generation Printers, Canada
Year published: 2009
Pages: 50pp
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Perfect Bound
Process: Offset
Features: 87 colour images; 18 b&w images
Dimensions: 26 x 18 x 1 cm
Weight: 273 g
ISBN: 978-0-921394-62-4
Price: $7 CDN

The Carrall Street publication documents Althea Thauberger’s site-specific work that took place on the 200-block of Carrall Street in front of Artspeak on September 30, 2008. It considered the specificities of the site as a nexus of social, economic, political, and cultural realities. The block was closed to traffic and illuminated by film lights. Collaborating with local communities, individuals, and organizations, Thauberger invited a diverse group to undertake independent actions or activities within the event’s framework.

Approximately forty performers worked across and through the delineation provided by the block, extending their activities into alleys and bars. The performances ranged from repeated physical actions, oratories, orchestrated conversations, and scripted performances that often occurred at an intimate scale, to reflected or framed quotidian situations. Because the event encompassed the entire block, the work took on an expanded subject matter that included the attitudes and activities of spectators and passersby, heightened aesthetics and conditions of representation, the street’s physical surroundings and architecture, and transitional moments in the street’s development.

The publication includes commissioned texts, scripts, a partial transcription of the Carrall Street forum, archival documents, and images.


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