April 4, 2014

Over the last year I have been co-organizing with the amazing Shelagh Pizey-Allen and Christina Hajjar. We’ve been working on many interesting projects, including a long table conversation in conjunction with the traveling exhibition, Off The Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art, which is at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) February 1, – April 20, 2014.

The long table event was a collaboration between The Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Winnipeg and the WAG. Off the Beaten Path features the work of 30 international artists who engage with issues of gender-based violence. With the Long Table we hoped to create a space for discussion and reflection on the role of art in addressing issues of violence.

Conceived by performance artist Lois Weaver, the Long Table is an experimental format for public dialogue. Anyone is welcome to come to the table to make statements, leave comments, ask questions, or simply to listen. We wanted to create an event that would ensure that everyone had an opportunity to speak from their experience and to respond to the art work in the show. Free passes to the exhibition were available on the day of the long table in order to increase access for folks who had not yet seen the show, or give others another chance to engage with the art before our discussion.

We were very pleased with the open discussion that flowed at the long table, and people’s desire to come and go from the table to the seating area as they felt compelled. Connections between Off The Beaten Path were made with another traveling exhibition, Walking With Our Sisters (WWOS), held at Urban Shaman Gallery March 21 – April 12. WWOS is a massive commemorative art installation comprised of 1,763+ pairs of moccasin vamps (tops) plus 108 pairs of children’s vamps created and donated by hundreds of caring and concerned individuals to draw attention to the injustice of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit. Important points were made about the differences in representation of violence and how misrepresentation or exclusion can occur when attempting to cover such a broad topic, as with Off The Beaten Path. We talked about race, colonization, allyship, self-representation, the names of the exhibitions, and more.