Places of a Present Past — book launch Tuesday, October 13

Tuesday, October 13 2015, 7pm
Publication Studio Vancouver, 222 East Georgia Street, Vancouver BC
This event is presented by Publication Studio Vancouver as part of the Vancouver Art/Book Fair’s open-source event series Artists’ Books Week.

Publication Studio Vancouver is pleased to host the Canadian launch of Places of a Present Past, published by Publication Studio Hudson and Southern Methodist University Meadows School of the Arts. Join us on Tuesday, October 13 at 7pm for presentations and a discussion by editor/curator Noah Simblist and artist Jin-me Yoon. Copies of this book, with attractive letterpress cover and several colour reproductions inside, are available for purchase at the event, or online through publicationstudio.biz (US$22/C$29).

Places of a Present Past brings together three exhibitions, all showcasing the work of international video artists, that were presented at the Meadows School’s Pollock Gallery in 2014 and curated by Noah Simblist and the Pollock Gallery’s 2014 curatorial fellow, Sally Frater. These exhibitions shared a common theme: addressing the traces of trauma on particular sites and paying close attention to the lasting impacts of war. The exhibitions explored in the publication include Jin-me Yoon’s Extended Temporalities, which invoked the colonial relationship between Japan and Korea in the first half of the 20^th century; the group show Where Are You From?, which included artworks by Aissa Deebi, Kamal Aljafari and Dor Guez recounting the story of the Israeli occupation of Palestine; and the Sarah Morris film 1972, alluding to the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, during which 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group – a film that pointed to the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany and beyond.

The artworks in the book are bound together by a historiographical impulse,” said Simblist. “In some sense, these artists act as historians. However, they are less interested in the truth than the way we feel through the legacies of past traumas. They reveal the oblique ways that we repress historical trauma, burying it in the very sites of their origin. Places of a Present Past is filled with an archaeological ethic, metaphorically digging down, both spatially and psychologically, into the depths of transnational grief.”

A European launch event for this book will take place on October 25 at Publication Studio Rotterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, Rotterdam (details TBA).