KELOWNA - Renowned and critically acclaimed artist Jayce Salloum will visit UBC to give a special talk to the graduating visual artist class at its bachelor of fine arts (BFA) grad show.

His talk, at 8 p.m., Saturday, April 19, in the Creative and Critical Studies building, 1148 Research Rd., UBC Okanagan, is free and open to the public.

Born and raised in Kelowna, Salloum was named a 2014 Governor General’s Award winner for Visual and Media Arts.

Salloum’s projects are rooted in an intimate engagement with places and the people who inhabit them. He considers his work part art and part “social lubrication,” a counter to dominant culture, a celebration of being, involvement with the community, and political action in both harmony and conflict.

Salloum has worked in installation, photography, drawing, performance, text and video since 1978, as well as curating and conducting a vast array of cultural projects. His recent work has taken place in Afghanistan, China, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Aotearoa – the Maori name for New Zealand – as well as Australia, the former Yugoslavia, France, Kamloops, Cumberland House, Galapagos Islands and other places throughout the Americas.

“My practise exists within and between the personal, quotidian, local, and the trans-national,” says Salloum. “In one sense it has consistently been about mediation – the gap between the experience and the accounting, telling and receiving of it, engaging in an intimate subjectivity and discursive challenge while critically asserting itself in the perception of social manifestations and political realities.”

Salloum currently lives in Vancouver. He has exhibited at both typical and unusual venues, sometimes in disused storefronts, on the platform of a subway station, in advertising kiosks in bus shelters or amongst ruins in the woods.

He has exhibited at community centres in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood, to institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou, Paris; CaixaForum, Barcelona; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; 15th Biennale Of Sydney; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Royal Ontario Museum; Robert Flaherty Film Seminars; Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Salloum’s texts/works have been featured in many publications such as; The Archive (Whitechapel, London/The MIT Press, 2006), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower Press, London, 2007), Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists, (Coach House Press, Toronto, 2008), Third Text, Semiotext(e), Framework, Felix, Fuse, Public, Prefix Photo, and Pubic Culture.

A monograph on his work, Jayce Salloum: history of the present, was published in 2009 by the Kamloops Art Gallery.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014