Border Zones: Crossing the Line

Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology at UBC transcends the stereotype of a traditional anthropology museum through its new exhibition of contemporary art. Featuring 12 international artists, “Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures” examines boundaries—cultural, ideological, geographical and museological—and their “permeability and construction.”

The shifting definition of landscape and place is explored by Hayati Mokhtar and Dain Iskandar Said’s four-channel video installation, Near Intervisible Lines, a lyrical portrayal of a place now lost beneath Malaysia’s east-coast sands. Homeland is the subject of Sri Lankan artist Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan’s collaborative installation Imag(in)ing ‘Home’. During a Vancouver residency, Shanaathanan collected 300 objects and images from the local Tamil community. He then sealed the material in large, empty pop bottles. As we are confronted with rows of bottled objects, some comforting, others disturbing, we question our preconceptions of home, migration and cultural identity.

The most visually compelling work in the exhibition, however, is Gu Xiong’s installation Becoming Rivers, which explores the artist’s migration to Canada from China. Two thousand white plastic boats, mimicking folded paper, begin their journey on the grassy fields of MOA’s grounds, which overlook the Pacific Ocean. Suspended in the air, they enter the museum, drifting through its halls between photographs of riverbanks along the Fraser and the Yangtze, which are juxtaposed on opposing walls. Finally, the boats flow into the main gallery space and condense around a painting depicting the imaginary merging of the two rivers—a reference to cultural assimilation and identity formation.

Highlighting institutional boundaries of the museum space, works such as Marianne Nicolson’s Wanx’id: to hide, to be hidden consider cultural tensions and exhibition display, while Edward Poitras’ Cell transforms a portion of the gallery into a jail cell and post office. A surprising investigation of museum borders comes from a collaboration between MOA and Hindu priest Prabakar Visvanath. It’s presented as a dual-screen video installation: The first screen displays a live feed of a 15th-century bronze statue of the Hindu deity Vishnu in the museum’s permanent galleries. The second screen shows Visvanath ceremonially pouring oil, milk, honey and fruit offerings over the very same statue, then dressing and adorning it with processional garlands. He is performing the abishekam ritual of renewal, a process that takes the statue out of the domain of secular museum display and into the realm of religious worship. The act crosses the boundaries of the museum’s traditional call for artifact preservation in favour of MOA’s new effort to honour objects in context. Somewhere in the world, a conservator shivers.

Sparking debate on the social, cultural, geographic and institutional borders we inevitably encounter in our hyper-connected and continually transforming world, “Border Zones” challenges us to reflect on the boundaries we are sometimes hesitant to cross and to abandon any preconceptions of what we can expect to see in a museum of anthropology.