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  • Jamie Hilder

    Jamie Hilder has his MA in English from Simon Fraser University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of British Columbia. His work has been shown in Vancouver at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Artspeak, and the Audain Gallery.

  • Am Johal

    Am Johal is a Vancouver based writer and social activist. His work has appeared in Electronic Intifada, Seven Oaks Magazine, ZNET, News From Within, Arena Magazine, Palestine Chronicle, Inter Press Service and other publications. He has been involved in the establishment UBC Humanities 101, Impact of Olympics on Community Coalition, Civil Society Development Project and will be launching “The Gramsci Salon: a flying university” in March 2007 and the on-line BC Monthly Review in June 2007. He has worked as an advisor to two BC Cabinet Ministers, as a provincial government representative to the Vancouver Agreement where he was involved in the expansion of health services in the Downtown Eastside, and in human rights in Israel with the Mossawa Center where he led an international advocacy campaign against discriminatory legislation affecting the residency status of married Palestinians and Arab Israeli citizens. He is presently a graduate student at the Institute for Social and European Studies in Hungary.

  • Thomas Kemple

    Thomas Kemple is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the rhetorical, literary and deconstructive dimensions of classical and contemporary social theory. His book on the melodramatic form of Marx’s political, economic and philosophical thought developed an interpretive method he is now employing to examine the allegorical structure of Weber’s sociology of the cultural vocations of modernity. Besides exploring the silenced or suppressed dimensions of the foundational, classical and canonical texts of social science in light of recent critical and analytical perspectives, he has also brought these insights to bear on the recovery of lost concepts, alternative genealogies, and forgotten figures in the field. A major concern throughout these studies is with how the visual framing of sociological theorizing provides both a mirror and a window onto the class structures and civil statuses of (post)modern capitalist societies, particularly with respect to the competing claims of ethnicity and race, gender and sexuality, and generation and age. He is the author of Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse (1995) and editor of The Vocation of Reason: Studies in Critical Theory and Social Science in the Age of Max Weber (2004), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

  • Germaine Koh

    Germaine Koh is a visual artist whose work is concerned with the significance of everyday activity, familiar objects, and common places. Her work has been presented De Appel (Amsterdam), BALTIC (Newcastle), The British Museum, the Liverpool Biennial, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace (Sydney), The Power Plant (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), and la Biennale de Montréal. Formerly Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, she is also an independent curator, partner in the independent record label weewerk, and a sessional lecturer at Emily Carr Institute. Koh is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

  • Melanie O’Brian

    Director/Curator of Artspeak 2004–2010.

  • Kara Uzelman

    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.

Talks & Events

Speakeasy: Territory

JAMIE HILDER, AM JOHAL, THOMAS KEMPLE, GERMAINE KOH, KARA UZELMAN
January 25–January 26, 2007

THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 8PM

Am Johal (Writer/Social Activist), Thomas Kemple (Sociologist), Germaine Koh (Artist/Curator)

FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 8PM

Jamie Hilder (Artist/Critic), Kara Uzelman (Artist)

Rethinking how civic space is defined, Speakeasy: Territory is a series of talks and readings that address the mutable definition of “territory.” Questioning whether “territory” is a spatial, geographic, political, economic, or social construct, urban space will be taken up as a contestable subject.

In 2005 Artspeak hosted the inaugural Speakeasy: Serial Space. Through six presentations, this event approached space as an endless repetition of particular spaces that appear throughout our conventions of “urban” or “nature.” Speakeasy: Territory series encourages artists, writers, and activists to continue this thinking within urban terrain, building on the past and on the exhibition Territory held at Artspeak, Presentation House Gallery, and public sites around the city in the summer of 2006.