The Vancouver Art Gallery’s eighteenth annual Heller Lecture will be delivered by Vivek Shraya, Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, best-selling author and Polaris Music Prize nominee. Shraya will speak to the Gallery’s spring presentation, Moving Still: Performative Photography in India (April 19 to September 2, 2019), an exhibition of thirteen groundbreaking artists based in India who examine themes of gender, religion and sexual identity.
As an artist of South Asian heritage, who identifies as trans, Shraya will address ideas of migration and diaspora as well as gender identity in relation to Moving Still. She will further draw parallels to the practice of artists in Moving Still and their focus on performance and reconstructing narratives to her own work, specifically Trisha (2018). In this series of self-portraits, Shraya emulates and juxtaposes herself with photographs taken of her mother dating back to the 1970s.
The Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition Moving Still examines key works from an early period of photography in India, not long after the camera’s invention in the nineteenth century, when an active culture of experimentation and exchange began to flourish. Through this historical context, the exhibition showcases the work of India’s shining contemporary artists, among them Pushpamala N, who stages herself as stereotypical female archetypes; Sunil Gupta, who explores experiences of gay life, often in terms of his own identity as an HIV-positive man; and Naveen Kishore, who documents his gender transformation into a female goddess as part of a performance and ode to a celebrated artist of Bengali folk theatre. Moving Stillalso features artists Nikhil Chopra, Anita Dube, Gauri Gill, Ranbir Kaleka, Sonia Khurana, Tejal Shah, Kiran Subbaiah, Sawai Ram Singh II, and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil.
WHEN: Wednesday, May 15 at 7 PM
WHERE: ANNEX Theatre (823 Seymour Street)
TICKETS NOW ON SALE: $40 General / $35 Members* at vanartgallery.bc.ca
*Doors open 6 PM. All tickets are general admission.
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