Carmen Papalia / Heather Kai Smith, Interdependence is Central to the Radical Restructuring of Power, 2020. Pencil on paper / digital drawing. Courtesy the artists.
SFU Galleries
@sfugalleries
Vancouver, British Columbia
Date
Curator
Karina Irvine, Christopher Lacroix, cheyanne turions
Drawing from the thinking of Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal” considers what is changing about our social and political realities, and what futures our responses move us toward.
Editors' Comment
On April 3, 2020, the Financial Times published Booker Prize–winning author and activist Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Pandemic is a Portal,” and it was rapidly shared across social media networks by many seeking interpretations and meanings for this moment.
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” Roy wrote. “This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Reflecting on this essay and questions it raises, three Vancouver-area curators asked artists and writers to respond, and the responses will be shared on SFU Galleries’ Instagram account throughout this exhibition’s run.
“If we accept Roy’s proposition, that the pandemic is a portal, then how can our responses to this time prepare the ground for forms of community to come,” the project curators speculate, “forms that are more just and more unsettled than the forms of community we’ve left behind?”
In an interesting statement on form, too, this project’s results will also be available as a free, printed zine once the social-media program has completed. Order one via the gallery by July 6 to have it mailed direct. —Leah Sandals, content editor