VANISHING ACT:

Curated Visual Art Exhibition

Jun 18 – Jul 8

Wed thru Sat, 12 – 6pm

Sun Wah Centre 3rd Floor, 4th Floor – 268 Keefer St.

Adwait Singh, Curator
SD Holman, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director

Vanishing Act at Centre A:
Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Sat Jul 2

Sun Wah Centre 2nd Floor – Unit 205, 268 Keefer St.

Visual Art Tour | 3pm
Reception | 5pm

Sun Wah Centre | | Free

Featuring nearly 20 artists from around the world, Vanishing Act is a survey of queer artistic practices from the Global South – South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas. Adwait Singh’s curation asks viewers to “behold the hulking vessel of modernity, where the only hope for a future is a ghostly one, the only inheritance a poisoned gift.” Singh and Holman ask us to face our own Frankensteins, in a manner that queers have long been wont, haunted as we are by spectral toxicities.

Our Vanishing Act Curated Visual Art Exhibition becomes fully realized, fully materialized on July 2, when Centre A opens its doors as our festival partner and we unveil the extension to this exhibition. We’re celebrating our complete complement of curated artists with a building-wide tour led by Curator, Adwait Singh, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director, SD Holman, and visiting guest artists. We then return to Centre A for a 5pm reception – come raise a glass to our most ambitious Curated Visual Art Exhibition ever!

Read the press release for curated visual art show, Vanishing Act.

Adwait Singh is an independent curator and theorist based out of New Delhi. Their works frequently weave in and out of areas of inquiry such as subjectivity formation, gender and sexuality, posthumanism, contemporary technogenesis and ecofeminism. Shortly after completing their Master’s at Goldsmiths, they seized the opportunity to be a part of the Students’ Biennale 2016 and have since facilitated different art projects and workshops for/with young artistic practitioners across the country for various non-profit organisations. Recent curations include ‘Mutarerium’ at the Mumbai Art Room that questions the terminology of the Anthropocene based on three more-than-human evolutionary timelines (Mumbai, 2019) and ‘Caressing History’ — a group show investigating the possibility of a body-based historiography for Prameya Art Foundation (New Delhi, 2018). They have been appointed as the curator of the 5th edition of the Mardin Biennial (2020).

As an art writer Adwait has been devoting his energies documenting and theorising independent exhibitions and alternative art practices.

SD Holman (born 1963, Hollywood, California) is an award-winning artist and curator whose work has toured internationally. An ECUAD graduate in 1990, Holman was picked up by the Vancouver Association for Non-commercial Culture (the NON) right out of art school. Holman was appointed Artistic Director of Pride in Art in 2008 and spearheaded the founding of the Queer Arts Festival, now recognized among the top 2 of its kind worldwide, and SUM, Canada’s only queer-mandated transdisciplinary gallery. Holman has programmed artists notably including Kent Monkman, Cris Derksen, Jeremy Dutcher, Paul Wong, Angela Grossmann and Dana Claxton. A few Curatorial highlights include TRIGGER, the 25th anniversary exhibition for Kiss & Tell notorious Drawing the Line project, Adrian Stimson’s solo show Naked Napi, and Paul Wong’s monumental multi-curator Through the Trapdoor underground storage locker exhibition. Some of SD Holman’s other experience running art spaces included founding and running Studio Q the notorious Art Salon in Vancouver’s DTES Chinatown as noted in Secrets of the City 1st edition.

A laureate of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious awards, Holman is known for engagement with themes of sex, death and identity. Holman’s work has exhibited at Wellesley College, the Advocate Gallery (Los Angeles), the Soady-Campbell Gallery (New York), the San Francisco Public Library, On Main Gallery, The Helen Pitt International Gallery, Charles H. Scott, Exposure, Gallery Gachet, the Roundhouse, Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Artropolis, and Fotobase Galleries (Vancouver). Holman’s portrait project BUTCH: Not like the other girls toured North America and is in its second print edition, published by Caitlin Press, Dagger Editions.