Vancouver Biennale: Curious Imaginings – Patricia Piccinini

September 14, 2018 – December 24, 2018
Patricia Hotel – Vancouver, BC

The 2018-2020 Vancouver Biennale will showcase Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini’s Curious Imaginings, a hyper-realist “world of oddly captivating, somewhat grotesque, human-animal hybrid creatures”. Her interactive experience will “challenge us to explore the social impacts of emerging biotechnology and our ethical limits in an age where genetic engineering and digital technologies are already pushing the boundaries of humanity.” Her work will be displayed in a wing of the century-old Patricia Hotel in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood.

More information on this ticketed exhibition and the Vancouver Biennale can be found here.

Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection

October 6, 2018 – January 28, 2019
Audain Art Museum – Whistler, BC

This exhibition presents a selection from the Kaplan & Levy Collection of outstanding contemporary art by Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander artists. Since the 1960s, artists from these communities have spearheaded a renaissance in the world’s oldest continuous artistic tradition, innovating within the idioms of visual languages that have developed over the course of millennia. While these dazzling paintings and beguiling sculptures often share formal characteristics with Western modern art, they represent conscientious efforts on the part of Aboriginal artists to share their culture with outsiders. Ancestral Modern will offer an opportunity for many Museum visitors to experience this extraordinary work for the first time. It includes innovators like Rover Thomas and Emily Kam Kngwarreye, who adapted materials and motifs traditionally used in ground painting, body painting, or the preparation of ritual objects in their works on canvas.

More information on this exhibition and the Museum of Anthropology can be found here.

Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia

November 1, 2018 – March 31, 2019
Museum of Anthropology – Vancouver, BC

Aboriginal women have been redrawing the boundaries of the contemporary Aboriginal art scene in Australia since the late 1980s, redefining a movement that continues today. This exhibition features sixty-eight works by nine prominent Aboriginal women – each from different remote regions of Australia and most of them are making their Canadian debut. MOA is planning public programming, workshops and a possible film series during the run of the exhibition.

This exhibition also coincides with MOA’s acquisition of sculptural works created by Torres Strait artists. These sculptures will be exhibited alongside a re-installation of MOA’s Australian collection.

More information on this exhibition and the Museum of Anthropology can be found here.