Saturday, June 12, 2010





Images courtesy of Graham Thompson



Post by Innika La Fontaine

It seems that whenever I switch on the news all I hear are the stories with shocking numbers: 13 killed by roadside bomb in Kabul; 35 orphaned by a terrorist attack in Iraq; 200 displaced from a small village in Darfur. So yeah, I know some statistics on the subject of war and conflict—but I don’t really know much about the people behind the headlines.

That’s why I’m thankful that two local artists throwing out some numbers of their own for a powerfully hopeful look at the lives of refugees.

As Ottawa’s World Refugee Week (WRW) rolls around this year (June 16 to 20), Graham Thompson and Sherry Tompalski are pulling together 65 works of art, 25 artists, 23 videos, 19 speakers, 13 non-government organizations, and two plays—all for our educational gain.

Now in its third year, the WRW celebration—that’s right, celebration—humanizes the stories and experiences of refugees and immigrants in Canada. Taking place at the Library and Archives Canada (395 Wellington Street) it will feature portraits, presentations and performances by activists and refugees from around the globe.

And given the fact most refugee stories are told by some stone-faced white guy in a metropolitan newsroom, it’s a welcome change to get the story first hand.

Thompson and Tompalski—a videographer and painter/designer respectively—planted the seed for WRW on a roadtrip to Chicago in 2007 when they envisioned a project about Afghani refugees in Canada. Their first exhibit of this kind of work ballooned into the massive five-day festival it is today.

When I asked Thompson about the need to put on a show of such proportions, he educated me with a soft-spoken, well-considered answer.

Meeting to discuss issues surrounding refugees is nothing new, Thompson pointed out—NGO’s and universities do it all the time—but generally people who go to these gatherings can get very burnt out by talking about torture for, say, four hours. But by putting together a festival of theatre, dance, media, music, visual art, in combination with these speeches, you create a broader emotional space to help digest the information.

Rather than a draining set of panel talks and lectures, this WRW will be an interactive and vibrant melting pot of arts and culture.

Each artist was selected to exhibit work as a refugee or in association with refugees and they’ll all be on hand to chat about the incredible diversity of work that’s included. If you can’t find something you like in this festival (there’s body painting, photonovels, paintings, singing, dancing, folklore and more I’ve probably missed) you probably just don’t like art.

Thanks to various government grants supporting the week, artists will be paid a bursary for their participation. For a refugee who once upon a time studied visual art in his or her homeland, this is a much-needed opportunity to build up a viable portfolio in a new country.

Back to the numbers thing: there are some 44 million people around the globe who have been driven from their homes by war, famine, economic collapse, and poverty. It’s a number so large even Thompson has to laugh at nervously to comprehend. World Refugee Week offer us a rare and important chance to relate to the lives of refugees beyond the television screen.

To boot, all festival events are free. For more information check out www.refugeeweek.com.

So I was among the fortunate few at the media preview for the much anticipated Pop Life exhibition at the National Gallery (NGC) on Wednesday morning. The show runs Friday, June 11 to September 19.

I’ll refrain from in-depth critical commentary on the show (the lovely and talented Sanita Fejzic is going to take care of that in Monday’s g-Gallery posting), except to share what I wrote in glow-in-the-dark chalk on the wall of the show’s darkened feedback room: “EXXXPLOSIVE!”

Thanks in part to the the already-controversial adult nature of some of the show’s content, the hype and buzz surrounding Pop Life may in fact be unprecedented in local circles—and for good reason. The internationally touring phenonmenon is big, bold, bawdy and anything but superficial.

But back to the preview. Poor Jonathan Shaughnessy, the NGC’s coordintator of Pop Life who had to lead a horde of 40 or 50 assorted media types through the show’s multiple rooms, a few of them loud with rock music. Jonathan must have felt like he was lecturing to a gaggle of scatterbrained cats. He virtually shouted his commentary at each stopping point and probably two-thirds of the very-distracted media reps weren’t listening much.

The tour revealed that this is the type of show where one saunter through will never be enough. There’s an abundance of eye candy and fodder for intellectual engagement.

Because almost everyone can relate to pop culture (I guest-lectured in a pop culture course at Algonquin College this spring), the Ottawa culture sector is not surprisingly showing signs of pop fever. Both WestFest and Blink Gallery are launching pop-themed art shows of their own in June, and there are probably other examples yet to pop into my head.

Tony