creative forces

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.”

Buffy Ste Marie has dazzled us with her music and political activism since the 60’s when her voice joined many others (and how about Bob Dylan ‘s Nobel prize!) raised in protest about human rights, particularly speaking out for her aboriginal people.  Although her voice was silenced for many years, she continued to travel the world, finding songs in her head, “Life is precious and diverse and worth protecting.”   Back in full force, she won the Polaris Prize in 2015 for her moving composition Power in the Blood

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