Notice Board

Art NOW speaker series presents: Gabi Dao
Listening oriented images and sensing sonic filmmaking
12 pm | October 16, 2023
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

Thinking through and with writers, scholars, DJ's, producers and more, we will consider how images might vibrate with sounds that are beyond what we 'hear' in the present. What rhythmic potentials and imaginaries exist beyond the confines of cut-and-paste truths and chrononormativity?

Gabi Dao is an artist from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, Canada) who now lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work often begins within the slippages of ‘history’, archives and storytelling— towards channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, Dao attempts to reclaim and re-enchant meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially in the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered and more-than-human communities. They have screened and exhibited their work and projects across Turtle Island, Asia and Europe and in 2021 they were shortlisted for Canada’s Sobey Award.

Gabi Dao's exhibition, What breaks on the horizon, is on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery from October 14, 2023 to January 13, 2024.