Gabi Dao’s solo exhibition What breaks on the horizon? is on view at Unit 17 from January 18 – February 29, 2024.
Doors 6:30pm
Films at 7:00pm
Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO Financial Group
RSVPs are helpful
About Gabi Dao
Gabi Dao (b.1991) 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.
Film Programme
Bugs and Beasts before the Law (2019)
Dir: Bambitchell
33min
An experimental film that explores the medieval practice of putting animals on trial. This history of colonial law-making forged political and sometimes profane relationships between humans and animals. Bambitchell’s essayistic work reimagines common perceptions of legal history and, in doing so, produces a world where past and present, fiction and non-fiction, human and animal fuse.
Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Kyle Mitchell have been collaborating since 2009. Their research-based artistic practice has taken form through moving image, installation and performance to re-imagine nationalist histories – playfully recycling official state documents and institutional archives.
Ancestral Echoes (2022)
Dir: Fileona Endoxa Dkhar
14:16
Landscapes are legacies of the places we inherit as home. An indigenous Khasi voice, my voice speaks about the Khasi hill tracks, of the past and the present. In the past, spirits dwelt here. In the present, there are ancestral echoes. Echoes of past belief and error. For the landscape exists, cut up and burnt, as legacy nonetheless.
Fileona Endoxa Dkhar is a Khasi visual artist. Working with themes of ecology, identity and mythology, her work desires to (borrowing words from Trinh T. Minh-ha) not “speak about” identity but to “speak nearby. Her research involves textual and visual elements, that are presented as performances, videos or audio-visual installations.
Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter (2021)
Dir: Chuquimamani-Condori & Joshua Chuquimia Crampton
52min
Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter follows in a heritage of Aymaran abolitionist oral history tradition and adopts a fantastical tone, serving as an ‘invitation to otherwise’. Written by Chuquimamani-Condori, shot mostly on 8mm film, with hand-drawn animation sequences and a score composed and performed by Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, enacts a ceremony for the artists’ late grandmother, Flora Tancara Quiñonez Chuquimia and details the event in stories of the artists’ family that compose part of the Aymara community, a group of indigenous nations whose territories overlap with Bolivia, Chile and Peru, and whose people live today across the globe, maintaining relations through land ties and ceremony.
Chuquimamani-Condori is a multidisciplinary artist & musician belonging to the Pakajaqi nation of Aymara people. Their recent works include DJ E (2023), Rayo Mix (2022), Across the Policed World: A Transnocturnal Huayño (2022), and Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter (2021), a collaborative work with Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. They also continue to do work with AIM SoCal, the Southern California chapter of the American Indian Movement (founded in 1968).
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton is a musician & artist belonging to the Pakajaqi nation of Aymara people. His recent musical releases include Profundo Amor (2023), 4 (2021) and The Heart’s Wash (2020), all full-length projects of solo guitar compositions. He also composed the score for Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter (2021).
The two siblings reside in Northern California with family and land ties in allyu Pahaza, Calacoto de Pacajes and provincia Nor Yungas regions of La Paz, Bolivia.
