Sheron Edey (Project Director) in action.

Standing on their Shoulders is a community-based project designed to preserve the heritage of Black English-speakers in Little Burgundy and to create a new generation of griots or cultural interpreters.  The project aims to:

• Capture the rich Black history of Little Burgundy from community residents and elders.
• Share and teach Little Burgundy’s Black History so that everyone can celebrate its contributions
• Identify and interpret the stories, landscape, and heritage of the district
• Retell the Black history of Little Burgundy

Over the course of the project, 20 youth participants will create inspiring short films of Little Burgundy’s history.  This project cannot succeed without a host of partners and supporters.  CEREV is one of our supporters and we recently took up their offer to run two workshops for our budding griots. (more…)

This month, we are pleased to be offering two training sessions in DSLR video production. These free workshops are presented in collaboration with The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) on November 12 & 19th from 12 – 2 PM in our Exhibition Lab.

Thanks to significant interest, these sessions are now at capacity!

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In 2010, anthropologist Andréanne Pâquet launched a participatory photography project, Ce Qui Nous Voile (Our Veil), working with more than 50 women from Montreal who wear the Muslim headscarf. Together with photographer Éric Piché, she met, photographed, and interviewed these women on why they wear the veil and what it means to them.

Workshop with Andréanne Pâquet
March 31, 2014
1 – 3 PM
CEREV Exhibition Lab
Concordia University J.W. McConnell Library Building
LB-671.10
e-mail cerev@concordia.ca to RSVP (mandatory)

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A full day workshop on the collective production of socially engaged art and agitprop with activist cultural producer Avram Finkelstein. Co-produced by CEREV and Concordia’s HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series with the support of the university’s Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery.

January 24, 2014
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
CEREV Exhibition Lab
LB-671.00

By special invitation only.

“Collective strategies for visual production on the issue of HIV criminalization” will be co-facilitated by activist/performer Jordan Arseneault and artist J’vlyn d’Ark. This session is presented in conjunction with “Collective Queer Cultural Production, AIDS and the Public Sphere,” a lecture by Avram Finkelstein at the Canadian Centre for Architecture on Thursday, January 23 at 7:00 PM.

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An interactive workshop on art, food, and performance with Toronto-based Palestinian artist Basil AlZeri and David Szanto, Concordia Individualized Program PhD student and Vanier Scholar in performative gastronomy. Co-produced by CEREV and FASA with support from the Office of the Dean and the Office of Student Affairs in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University.

January 23, 2014
10:00 AM – 2:30 PM
CEREV Exhibition Lab
LB-671.00

e-mail cerev@concordia.ca to RSVP (mandatory)

All participants will be required to bring a food item with them as part of the praxis component of the session. Two short presentations will be followed by a series of exercises with all attendees.

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On October 11, 2013, CEREV Director Erica Lehrer and Concordia PhD in Humanities candidate Florencia Marchetti will lead the first workshop in Concordia’s Graduate and Professional Skills Research Conversations Series.

Titled “Exhibition as Research: Curating and Public Scholarship in the Humanities,” the workshop will run from 1:15-2:15 pm in room S1.435 of the John Molson Building on Concordia’s downtown SGW campus. Visit the Graduate and Professional Skills website to register and find more information.

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A workshop with Bernadette Lynch (museum writer, researcher and consultant)

October 16, 2013
14:00 – 16:00
CEREV Exhibition Lab
LB-671.00

e-mail cerev@concordia.ca to RSVP (mandatory)

Beneath the rhetoric of the utopian, democratic, dialogic museum, the space is always contested and political. This is the very reality, Lynch maintains, that the museum does much in its power to ignore. In fact, research has shown that the museum’s participatory engagement can produce the opposite effect, exacerbating the antagonistic potential existing within social relations, evidence of which can be seen throughout current museum public engagement work. Consequently, it can leave everyone dissatisfied.

What to do as a museum professional when faced with resistance, opposition, conflict – internally or externally – or both? As one staff member at a prominent UK museum put it, “Life is messy, controversial, fluid, contentious – lots of things a museum has difficulty with!”

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A workshop with James Clifford (University of California, Santa Cruz)

October 9, 2013
14:00 – 16:00
CEREV Exhibition Lab
LB-671.00

e-mail cerev@concordia.ca to RSVP (mandatory)

New publics and branding exercises; complex relations with source communities; material pressures and generational shifts; performance art and digital networking; innovative forms of collaboration and research…  The talk explores the good and the bad news for museums devoted to cross-cultural understanding in times of globalization and decolonization.

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Feb. 28 – March 2

A three-day symposium on contemporary Indigenous film, media arts and exhibitionary practice featuring Canadian artists, filmmakers, scholars, and curators.

Transmissions: Sharing Indigenous Knowledge and Histories in the Digital Era is a three-day collaborative event including workshops, a film screening, an interactive art installation and a public symposium. Transmissions will explore the interface of Indigenous knowledge and oral history with digital technologies, experimental museology, and new communicative forms in twenty-first century exhibition and artistic practice. The symposium provides an opportunity for prominent academics, curators and museum professionals to discuss their recent research in the fields of Indigenous exhibition and curatorial practice, particularly as it relates to the experimental interface of museum work, art, and technology, and to enter into dialogue with Indigenous artists and arts professionals who also employ new media and digital technologies in their artistic practice.

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February 27, 2013
2:00-4:00pm
CEREV, LB 671.10

Co-Sponsored by the Curatorial Theory and Practice Working Group.

Invisible Violence brings together the work of four artists—Rebecca Belmore, Ken Gonzales-Day, Francisco-Fernando Granados, and Louise Noguchi—who use photography as a point of reference for histories of violence that inform a contemporary politics of representation. Their work intentionally covers, erases, withdraws or cuts apart the main subject of the photographs, delaying the recognition of the structural and systemic violence underlying each image. Taking this interruption as its starting point, the project asks that “we”—the audience who are informed by contemporary mediascape riddled with images of violence—problematize the first person pronoun. As Susan Sontag writes, “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”

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