May There Always Be Sunshine (The Wind And The Void) | Artist Talk by Kandis Friesen

Please join us on August 18th at 6PM CT for May There Always Be Sunshine (The Wind And The Void), an online artist talk by Kandis Friesen.

Link to Live Stream

The flag says this, this motto, like a state greeting card to the child on the event of every sunrise of each year. The epic is always dawning, and we arise to its awakening, follow in its flow. This is the ghost we are surrounded by – this sunshine, the wind, and the void.

Working with text between language, image, and object, Kandis Friesen presents an artist lecture on construction and collage, moving along paths of making and thinking that reside on the edges, in movements and movement, in exiled and exhilarated states. Drawing on the practices of unofficial artists in her extended family, the work of Moscow conceptualist and other Soviet artists, and the use of grafting and montage in a range of other practices, Friesen will speak about installation, virtuality, and diaspora. Her research and methods work in parallel with such practices, where citation becomes a kind of collective literature, a writing-into the world. This is a work of constant translation and transposition, where the replica and the copy, the echo and the choir develop as central modes. Such a relay brings together histories not yet written, art works not yet named, and monuments and memories not yet formed: resistant to the solid and committed to dispersal. This commitment is a diasporic site-specificity – the connected dispersal as site – allowing ideas, objects, actions and texts to remain contiguous across expansive realms.

There is a secret, and I don’t let on. I’m ready for the knowing. It is about balance, poise, and waiting. I know there is an inside and an outside, the entrance vague but understood. The untethered is the ethos here, tethered only to other untethered, so that the choir’s voice is both the ship and the sail.

Kandis Friesen’s work is anchored in diasporic language, dispersed translations, and disintegrating archival forms. Often circulating as video, sculpture, installation, and writing, her compositions build from architectural, material, and spectral inhabitations of exile, amplifying minute and myriad histories at once. Her work has been exhibited and screened at LUX (London, UK), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, US), Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago, US), TRUCK Contemporary (Calgary, CA), Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton, CA), FIFA (Montreal, CA), WNDX (Winnipeg, CA), MIX NYC (NYC, US), Athens Digital Arts Festival (Athens, GR), and Jihlava International Film Festival (Jihlava, CZ), among others. She has received grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, CALQ, the Images Festival Steamwhistle Award (with Nahed Mansour, 2012), Best Canadian Work at WNDX (2018), and the Brucebo Art Foundation Travel Research Grant (2019). Her video works are distributed by Groupe Intervention Vidéo in Montreal.

All public programming is free and open to the public.

Associated Programming

Artist Talk by Catherine Opie | Thursday, July 23, 2020 | 6PM CT
Co-presentation with Centre for Research in Cultural Studies University of Winnipeg (CRiCS), MAWA, and the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation.

Solo Exhibition | The Modernist by Catherine Opie | June 10 – August 22, 2020

Solo Exhibition | The Cedar, The Birch, Our Hands At Full-Mast, Behind The After by Kandis Friesen | June 10 – August 22, 2020