What: Trans-Pacific Transmissions: Video Art Across the Pacific
Where: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
When: Opens Saturday, continues to Sept. 5
Admission to gallery: $11, $13, free for five and under. Free admission today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
A new Victoria art exhibition reminds British Columbians they’re not the only ones grappling with the liquefied natural gas industry and its potential pitfalls.
In Malaysia, for example, the fallout from such projects includes the desecration of ancient cemeteries.
Opening today, Trans-Pacific Transmissions: Video Art Across the Pacific is the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s big summer show. Fifteen video artists from the Pacific Rim have contributed works. All are linked to what might seem an unlikely subject: trans-Pacific trade.
The global impact of such trade — particularly the power of cultural imperialism — is a recurring theme in the show.
Gallery curator Haema Sivanesan says the most overtly political offering is a short documentary by Malaysian artist Azharr Rudin. Rudin examines the social impact of a massive oil/liquefied natural gas project announced by the Petronas corporation in 2011.
Construction will displace 10 villages around the town of Pengerang in southern Malaysia. More than 28,000 people are affected. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching segment of Rudin’s 2014 video documents how the Petronas mega-project will necessitate the expropriation of six graveyards.
“I hope these cemeteries will be preserved,” says a tearful Malaysian woman in Rudin’s video.
Sivanesan said: “You realize how dramatic the situation is, because they’re actually moving cemeteries — they’re exhuming the graves.”
Two galleries for the exhibition will be crammed with screens playing the art videos on a loop. Some are short — others are as long as 40 minutes. Some are new, some date back the 1970s. The artists come Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Chile, Japan and other countries.
Sivanesan, a native Australian who has worked at the gallery for a year, hatched the concept of Trans-Pacific Transmissions: Video Art Across the Pacific. She’s co-curating it with Rodolfo Andaur from Chile, Kathleen Ditzig from Singapore and Mark Williams from New Zealand.
Sivanesan says the exhibition is, in part, intended to anticipate the newly minted Trans-Pacific Partnership. Signed in February, the trade agreement intends to promote business relationships among 12 Pacific Rim countries, including Canada. The socio-economic impact of the agreement will be profound; participating countries have a combined gross domestic product of $28.5 trillion.
Video artists included in Trans-Pacific Transmissions are interested in the cultural and social aspects of trans-Pacific trade. Sivanesan says in contemporary art, this concern dates at least as far back at the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Artists in Canada were worried about American cultural imperialism,” Sivanesan said.
Some videos in the exhibition are less literal and more poetic than Rudin’s Petronas-in-Malaysia documentary. Sivanesan pointed to a work by videographer Bill Viola, Ancient of Days, filmed from 1979 to 1981. Viola, an American artist, was living in Japan on a cultural exchange fellowship at the time.
One part of Ancient of Days shows Washington’s Mount Rainier. As the camera pulls back, the screen reveals a Japanese street scene — thus implying a merging of the two countries’ cultures.
A modern art-video exhibition about trans-Pacific trade might sound a touch daunting — and academic — for the ordinary person who equates visual art with paintings or statues.
In response, Sivanesan is quick to point out how pervasive video art has become in the 21st century.
“It’s more likely now that artists would reach for their iPhone video camera than they would for a pencil. Artists are using it. It’s become such a ubiquitous art form.”
She says the exhibition is accessible. Many videos are people-focused, with some being “quite cinematic” and others being “quite funny and absurd.”
Sivanesan added: “Contemporary art is always about diving in and taking a risk, right?”