Nep Sidhu: Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded)

 

PRESENTING PARTNER

Nep Sidhu is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is concerned with the reverberations of form, antiquity, myth, and history with an affinity for community. Through material investigations that use textiles, sculpture, video, and sound, Sidhu’s work seeks moments of knowledge.

Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) explores how memories persist in the present, especially when related to personal and collective traumas. Reflecting upon Sikh histories, amongst other collectively formed and formative histories considered through collaborations with Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin and Michael Reynolds, this exhibition explores how memorialization practices can transfigure grief and loss.

By reflecting on difficult and contentious histories as he has inherited them, Sidhu’s work considers how the labour of cultural reproduction unfolds in the aftermath of trauma. Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) activates artistic forms towards cultural restoration and charges the spaces of memorialization with new kinds of images, objects and language. The works in the exhibition invite multiple readings where diverging and overlapping responses can take root. Here, the exercise of memory is rooted in the possibility of coming together across difference, of listening, of learning, and of maintaining the possibility of understanding being reshaped in response, contributing to a writing of histories that speak back to power.

This exhibition is presented by the SFU Galleries with Indian Summer Festival, and is produced by Mercer Union (Toronto) and the Esker Foundation (Calgary) with the support of the Ontario Arts Council. (Nep) Nirbhai Singh Sidhu is a Toronto based artist whose works have been exhibited internationally. He is a member of the Black Constellation collective, designs the non- commercial clothing line Paradise Sportif and helps to run Sher- E- Punjab Sports Academy in Chakar, Punjab.

Curated by cheyanne turions

Full venue description and accessibility information: Click Here

Nep Sidhu: Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded)

From May 30 to August 3
Venue: Audain Gallery, SFU Woodwards
149 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC V6B 1H4
Tickets: Free