Blog # 62…October,
2016
More
anniversaries - 400 years of Shakespeare, 50 years of Star Trek and This
Magazine, wonder what will survive from 2016 to remember in half a century or
four???
Art and
social justice were discussed recently at Massey Hall, by four Canadians whose
lives and work reflect their commitment to speaking out in their medium about
violence, cruelty and unfairness in our world.
Film maker Deepa Mehta’s newest film Anatomy of Violence looks at the brutal rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi in 2012. She takes the controversial approach of seeking to understand the young men involved and positioning them in the culture that produced them. “It was too convenient for them just to be evil,” says Mehta, “we don’t become who we are in isolation.”
Rebecca
Belmore was the first aboriginal woman to represent Canada at the 2005 Venice
biennale with her work Fountain. The piece features water in its many forms as
a symbol for one of the elements that gives us life and explores how women are
involved in its provision. In this, as in installations that have followed,
Belmore brings forward the complex association of people, places and things
with a sensitivity to history and place and the way aboriginal people (women in
particular) are treated as “other”. 
Andre Alexi won
the Giller Prize for fiction in 2015 for Fifteen Dogs. In this look at time, consciousness,
belonging, mortality, art and love, he uses the device of imagining a wager
between the gods Hermes and Apollo about whether dogs if they were given language
would be happier that humans. Hmmmm, I
like the notion of running across a field, not to mention curling up for a nap
in the sun, maybe dogs are happier even without talking.
Four
Canadian artists to make us proud, revealing through film, music, visual art
and fiction some of the deeper, sometimes darker, sides of life.
Then there’s
the irrepressible Ai Weiwei who both tickles us and makes us think. His current
installation at the Palazzo Strozzi in
Florence is a collection of red rubber dinghies, representing the thousands of
refugees arriving in Europe from Africa and the middle east…. both a political
statement and a brilliant contemporary contrast to what usually appears in this
beautiful renaissance gallery.
Speaking of
refugees, we’re still waiting for our Iraqi family to complete their jump
through the hoops of immigration
