THE COMMUNITY ARCHIVE PROJECT
KAG Visitors
Open Gallery
October 25 to December 2, 2023
Organized by Emily Hope
The Community Archive Project invites visitors to contribute stories and experiences of Kamloops and the region that may not appear in the official archive or are not shared as the main narrative of this place. This is a community space where each visitor’s personal contribution adds to a collective revised narrative that fills in and enriches our understanding of this community.
How people and events are memorialized often offers clues to who is doing the memorializing. While history is often understood as permanent and fixed, what if it were told from another perspective? Culture is fluid and ever changing and comes from lived experience. What stories are missing from the official Kamloops archive? What lived experience has been erased? What do you want to add?
This engagement is inspired by the video presented on the Open Gallery, Crystal Mowry and Deanna Bowen, exhibition tour at Kamloops Art Gallery of Deana Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive, September 23, 2023
Video by Jonathon Fulton
1 hour, 11 minutes
For more than 20 years, Deanna Bowen’s practice has evolved from its roots in experimental documentary video into a complex mapping of power as seen in public and private archives. Whether it is through strategies of re-enactment or dense constellations of archival material, Bowen’s work traces her familial history within a broader narrative of Black survival in Canada and the United States.
Combing historical texts, petitions, and archives ranging from the local to the international, Bowen weaves together narrative threads of migration, power networks, and hierarchies of remembrance. With Black Drones in the Hive Bowen examines how dispossession and renaming—acts that are inscribed on both the land and public record—are part of power’s syntax. In a moment when we are spurred to redefine civic duty and rethink monuments, Bowen’s exhibition illuminates the roots of a reckoning.
Photo: Charo Neville