On Wednesday, September 21, the museum announced three new upcoming exhibits for the 2016/17 Season, promising to bring some of its finest artifacts to light.
“At MoA, it is our mission and mandate to foster a deeper awareness and appreciation of different social and cultural perspectives,” said MoA Director Anthony Shelton. “These exhibits challenge our own notions of identity and social philosophy, and offer insight on the fascinating and thought-provoking cultural expressions that unite modern-day Vancouverites to the human experience.”
The MoA’s first exhibit of the season, entitled Layers of Influence: Unfolding Cloth Across Cultures, will be curated by Dr. Jennifer Kramer from the department of anthropology at UBC. 138 textiles from across the globe will be hung from the ceiling of the MoA’s Audain Gallery, swaying above ovular, petal-shaped pedestals. Each of the garments – many spanning over two meters in length – were carefully selected “for their sheer exquisiteness” out of 45,000 textiles boasted by the MoA collection. Highlights include patterned Adinkra fabrics and golden kente cloth from Ghana, a cerulean silk longpao or “imperial dragon robe” from China, a pulkari chadar worn by Punjabi brides and the ceremonial shawls of the Amazonian Shipibo people. Layers of Influence opens on November 17 and runs until April 2017.
Dr. Nuno Porto introduced the MoA’s second exhibit with an Ashaninka bandolier worn by tribal leaders in the Amazon. This string of man-made beads and two stuffed “cock-of-the-rock” birds emblemizes the relationship between man and Nature. “The idea has been to create relations between the ‘here and now’ and other, similar challenges abroad, which we face in BC,” said Porto. Enumerating examples in which resource extraction has disrupted the rich artisan traditions of indigenous South American cultures, Porto also made a clear parallel with some of the challenges faced by First Nations groups in the Pacific Northwest. Featuring garments, pottery and woven baskets from the Amazonian people, Amazonia: The Rights of Nature opens on March 9 2017.
The third presentation was given by Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura of the Asian Studies Department at UBC. Nakamura opened her presentation with a twofold challenge to her audience, in the form of an ink blot and an open question — “Is this a piece of writing?” The exhibit, Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia, promises to challenge our distinctions between aesthetic and semantic meanings of words in a multimedia, visually transfixing experience.
“We leave traces of ourselves throughout life, either visible or invisible,” said Nakamura. “These traces are the theme of the exhibition.”
Among the five artists featured in the Traces of Words exhibit is Tibetan refugee Nortse, whose work, Book of Ashes, binds “a memory of his childhood, of burned books and the burned ashes scattered on the ground” into a codex of cultural trauma and personal experience. Other examples include the murals of Shamsia Hassani, the first Afghan graffiti artist, whose work portrays themes of hypocrisy and injustice with unexpected beauty. Nakamura closed her talk by asking her captivated audience “if you need to understand the semantic meaning to appreciate the words.” Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia runs from May 11 to October 9 of next year — be sure to look for the satellite exhibit at Irving K. Barber in May 2017.
These three exhibits are an opportunity for UBC students and the public to actively ponder the social, political and material dimensions of Indigenous art. With over half a million objects, the MoA has an international reputation for one of the most extensive collections of ethnographic objects. Speaking on the MOA as an integral part of UBC campus and academic circles, Shelton stated that the MoA is “seeking to bring the university to the community and the community to the university.”
The MoA director also mentioned that he is confident that the museum will continue to expand and evolve as one of the most extensive and provocative repositories of cultural objects from across the globe.