twenty-three days at sea, chapter one

Nour Bishouty, Christopher Boyne, Elisa Ferrari, Amaara Raheem
 
Twenty-Three Days at Sea is an unconventional travelling artist residency, produced by Access Gallery in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Art Gallery, offering selected emergent visual artists passage aboard container ships sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai. Crossing the Pacific takes approximately 23 days, during which time the artists are considered “in residence” aboard the vessels.

The idea for this residency project was provoked in part by the fact that Access Gallery is a small, publicly-funded organization based in a city whose notorious real estate market renders the spatial demands of a traditional residency particularly difficult to realize. Because we lacked the capacity to host artists on Vancouver’s terra firma for any meaningful length of time, one might say (cynically or otherwise) that we cast our thinking out to sea. But far more importantly, Twenty-Three Days at Sea offered the opportunity to ask an important set of questions relevant to our own socio-political coordinates in a major port city on the Pacific Rim. By embedding artists within the system of global sea-borne freight, and offering them the opportunity to consider and respond to it, we proposed a means through which to render that system visible.

The exhibition Twenty-Three Days at Sea, Chapter One presents new bodies of work by the residency’s inaugural four artists—Nour Bishouty, Christopher Boyne, Elisa Ferrari, and Amaara Raheem—produced in response to their time spent on the open sea. While diverse in their treatment of both media and subject matter, each of these artists’ practices is marked by a perceptible state of seeking. Their works on exhibition do not directly convey their experiences on the cargo vessels. Rather, through sculpture, sound, video, gathered ephemera, text, and movement, they meditate on the carriage of experience itself, as well as the complexity of translation, the fallibility of recall, and the conditions of complicity.

This exhibition includes the launch of four limited edition (hand-sewn, signed) bookworks: reproductions of each artist’s residency logbook, which record and represent the weeks spent at sea.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips
Access Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
28/05-7/07/2016
Niagara Artists Centre, St. Catherines, Canada
13/10/2016-10/01/2017