Visual Arts professor and UVic Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices Carey Newman gave this inspirational talk at TEDx Whistler recently, guiding us through some of his inspirational art pieces while teaching us how art can be the key to enabling ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Our latest Visiting Artist is South Asian Muslim Canadian artist Farheen Haq. All are welcome to this free public talk, 7:30pm Wed, Oct 18, in room A162 of the Visual Arts building.
Haq’s multidisciplinary practice — which often employs video, installation and performance — is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Her current work focuses on understanding her family history on Turtle Island, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.
She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally, including in New York, Toronto, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Maternal Interior at the Ann Arbor Art Center (Ann Arbor, Michigan), I am my mother’s daughter at Campbell River Art Gallery, Sentirse en Casa at Casa Cultura Gallery (Medellín, Colombia), Fashionality at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg, ON), Collected Resonance at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and The Emperor’s New Clothes at Talwar Gallery (New York).
Haq received her Bachelor of Arts in International Development from the University of Toronto, her Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa, and her Master of Fine Arts from York University (Toronto). In 2014, Haq was nominated for Canada’s preeminent contemporary art prize, the Sobey Art Award.
A South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who was born and raised amongst a tight-knit Muslim community on Haudenosaunee Territory in the Niagara region of Ontario, Haq currently lives and works on the unceded Lkwungen Territory of Victoria BC.
Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:
Presented by UVic’s Department of Writing
For more information on this lecture please email: writing@uvic.ca
Anishinaabe journalist and educator Duncan McCue is the author of Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities. His talk with Writing’s Environmental Journalism class will draw on his award-winning podcast Kuper Island for a thoughtful reflection on building respectful relationships with Indigenous communities and how Canadians can take meaningful steps toward reconciliation.
McCue will also present the separate online talk “Beyond Kuper Island: A Journalist’s Reflection on Truth and Reconciliation”, presented by the Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies and the Faculty of Humanities.
This talk happens at 7pm Thursday, October 19, online only via Zoom: register here to get the link.
Duncan McCue is an award-winning CBC broadcaster and leading advocate for fostering the connection between journalism and Indigenous communities. He was the host of Helluva Story on CBC Radio and was also the driving force behind Kuper Island, a remarkable eight-part podcast series on residential schools.
McCue was with CBC News for 25 years. In addition to hosting CBC Radio One’s Cross Country Checkup, he was a longstanding correspondent for CBC-TV’s flagship news show, The National, and continues to maintain an association with CBC.
He joined Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication on July 1, 2023 and is an associate professor, specializing in Indigenous journalism and storytelling. He has also taught journalism and created courses at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and Toronto Metropolitan University and also as a visiting fellow at Carleton.
Over the years he developed a unique online resource, Reporting in Indigenous Communities, which inspired his latest work, a new textbook called Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities. McCue is also the author of The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir, which recounts a season he spent in a hunting camp with a Cree family in northern Quebec as a teenager.
McCue studied English at the University of King’s College, then did his law degree at UBC. He was called to the bar in British Columbia in 1998.
McCue is Anishinaabe, a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario.
Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.
The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.
Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca
The cast of The Woman Who Outshone The Sun (photo: Megan Farrell)
Proving that experience matters when it comes to creating impactful productions, Phoenix Theatre is offering an all-alumni directed season—ideally matched to UVic’s upcoming 60th anniversary celebrations.
It all kicks off with two productions that speak to Phoenix’s past and present: Applied Theatre professor Yasmine Kandil directs SETYA, the latest in the continuing Staging Equality series, while sessional instructor Alistair Newton offers The Importance of Being Earnest—Oscar Wilde’s 128-year-old classic comedy that (surprisingly) has never been presented before on campus.
SETYA offers a double bill of The Woman Who Outshone the Sun and Shi-shi-etko, two children’s stories ideally suited to Staging Equality’s mandate of offering IBPoC-focused performances. “We wanted stories by and about Indigenous and people of color to be accessible to our young audiences and their families, and I think this show will deliver,” says Kandil. “These two stories both talk about important issues facing Indigenous communities in Canada and in Latin America.”
With four productions staged over the past two years (Journey to Mapu, Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story, Im:print and It’s Just Black Hair), SETYA sees the return of previous Staging Equality partners as narrators here: Paulina Grainger of the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria (The Woman who Outshone the Sun) and Kwakwaka’wakw performer and UVic En’owkin School alum Krystal Cook (Shi-shi-etko).
“Krystal has amazing stage presence and an ability to bring tenderness as well as strength to carry the enormity of the story she is telling. And Paulina has a magical way of drawing the audience into the narrative,” says Kandil. “I’ve enjoyed their approach to creating art and engaging with our students. I felt both stories required actors who were strong performers who could also embrace the community awareness element of the work we are carrying out.”
While theatre for young audiences is a style more often presented by alumni in the community, Kandil believes this is yet another way to welcome diverse audiences into the Phoenix. “We know the audiences who have attended our previous Staging Equality programming will return, and we also wanted children and their families to come to our theatre,” she concludes. “Audiences, young and old, will be able to engage with these topics in a manner that allows them to digest the material, and hopefully the stories might last with them a while.”
SETYA director Yasmine Kandil (photo: Megan Farrell)
“Krystal has amazing stage presence and an ability to bring tenderness as well as strength to carry the enormity of the story she is telling. And Paulina has a magical way of drawing the audience into the narrative,” says Kandil. “I’ve enjoyed their approach to creating art and engaging with our students. I felt both stories required actors who were strong performers who could also embrace the community awareness element of the work we are carrying out.”
While theatre for young audiences is a style more often presented by alumni in the community, Kandil believes this is yet another way to welcome diverse audiences into the Phoenix. “We know the audiences who have attended our previous Staging Equality programming will return, and we also wanted children and their families to come to our theatre,” she concludes. “Audiences, young and old, will be able to engage with these topics in a manner that allows them to digest the material, and hopefully the stories might last with them a while.”
Earnest director Alistair Newton (photo: Catherine Lemmon)
While SETYA focuses on young audiences, The Importance of Being Earnest is a perennially popular production that has never gone out of style since its 1895 debut. What’s the appeal for a very contemporary director like Alistair Newton?
“Aside from the obvious answer that it has got to be one of the greatest works of comic writing in the English language, it’s also a work coded with all sorts of transgressive satire—much of which would only have been legible to those members of the audience with the right ear to hear it,” he says. “Populism with a wicked satirical edge has always been irresistible to me.”
Newton, who is also teaching Theatre’s fall elective on drag culture and was just announced as a director for the prestigious Shaw Festival’s 2024 season, says he enjoys “excavating the hidden histories and secret codes” of what’s often described as classical theatre.
“Earnest is so constantly revived that it almost feels like a meme at this point, rather than a play,” he explains. “True, the 19th century gave us hysterical sexual repression and the codification of rigid gender roles, but it also gave us radicals who rebelliously pushed back—like the pioneering sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the Danish artist and trans woman Lili Elbe, and William Dorsey Swann, an enslaved black activist and drag performer who was likely the first person to refer to himself as a ‘queen’.”
Much like SETYA, Newton feels Earnest will also resonate with Phoenix audiences.
“Oscar Wilde loved a paradox, and both his legacy and the history of Earnest has sort of become one: at the time of his arrest for ‘gross indecency’, Wilde had two hit shows running in the West End and had completely conquered mainstream boulevard entertainment in London—but, at the same time, his queerness was considered so scandalous by his society that they had to forcibly remove him from their midst.”
Finally, as a returning alumni, how does it feel for Newton to be back at the Phoenix—both directing and teaching? “A lot of things change in a couple of decades, but some things are exactly how I left them: the graffiti on the scene shop wall and the very particular smell as you first enter the Roger Bishop Theatre,” he quips.
“But I think my favourite change is something I perceive in the students: they seem much more willing to advocate for themselves and to challenge orthodoxies, ideas of canon and the educational status quo. At the risk of sounding like an old queen, the kids definitely seem alright to me.”
SETYA runs October 12-14 + 19-21 while The Importance of Being Earnest runs November 9-25, both at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre.
Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:
Free & open to the public
Presented by UVic’s Department of Writing
For more information on this lecture please email: writing@uvic.ca
Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019.
Join us for this free talk at 11:30am Mon Oct 16 in UVic’s Clearihue building, room C112.
Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. The Woo-Woo won the 2019 Hubert-Evans Prize in Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction and longlisted for the 2019 Stephen Leacock Medal.
She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune, and in 2023 released a collection of stories, Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality. Her fiction and nonfiction have also appeared in No Tokens, The Fiddlehead, Ricepaper and Apogee Journal.
Wong has served as the writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, University of Fraser Valley, Vancouver Public Library, Richmond Public Library, Kimmel Nelson Harding Center in Nebraska City, Studios of Key West in Florida, and Caldera Arts in Sisters, Oregon. She holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of Winnipeg.
Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.
The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.
Free and open to the public | Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) | Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca