BEARING WITNESS
Central Gallery
January 14 to March 10, 2012
Curated by Ian M. Thom
This exhibition launches a year of programming at the Kamloops Art Gallery that focuses on the re-reading of history, the provocation of power relations and the notion of “bearing witness” to world events through personal and collective narratives. Bearing Witness is the first in four exhibitions throughout 2012 that will be ideologically linked by these common threads.
Socially engaged works of art offer a powerful means of communicating the human experience. They bring attention to political violence, unjust social realities and man’s inhumanity to man. Drawn from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition brings together the work of 27 artists who examine industrial exploitation, large-scale government action, the atrocities of war, the history of slavery, and the representation of women in society. The strategies and aims of these artists are as distinctive as the visual languages they employ. The photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa, for example, saw their role as creating a record through the documentation of unfolding events. The painters Leon Golub and Nancy Spero responded to events with work that incited debate and galvanized communities. Others, such as Barbara Kruger and Magdalena Campos-Pons, are committed to exposing historical invisibility. Provocative and unsettling, the images in this exhibition bear witness to the powerful forces that shape our lives and world.
Bearing Witness is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery with the generous support of The Killy Foundation and Odlum Brown Limited
Generously sponsored by Radio NL
Stephen Shames
Tear Gas Grenade, Berkeley, 1970
silver gelatin print
Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft
