For our third installment of our series of conversations in our Emerging Artist Residency program, we listen in on Gabi Dao and Vo Vo who cover a wide breadth of topics that connect to their sound practices and interests in subjectivity and memory. They discuss a myriad of ideas around digital representations and our current times.
Gabi Dao is an artist and co-organizer at Duplex, a DIY project space + studio collective based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) SLAY-WA-TUTH Nations. Her interdisciplinary practice insists on counter-memory, intimacy, hyphenation, multiple truths and blurred temporalities through the pursuit of sculpture, installation, moving image and sound. She prioritizes complications, questions and productive confusions against the aesthetic systems of homogeneity, complicity and control. Often, her work begins with interests in ‘patchwork’ conceptions of time and materiality, tracing histories of the everyday through themes of globalization, consumption, belief and belonging. She has shown her work at Kamias Triennale (Quezon City, Philippines) Unit 17, grunt gallery, Audain gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver, Canada), Terrain Biennial (Los Angeles, US), Blinkers (Winnipeg, Canada), Images Festival (Toronto, Canada) and International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).
Vo Vo is a radical educator of 10 years in over 20 countries in Inclusion, Refugee Support, Trauma-Informed Care, and Racial Justice. Editor of an internationally renowned publication for People of Color, speaker, curator and musician who has toured in Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the States. Anarchist and local festival organizer. One of the festivals they curate is IntersectFest: A Festival For and By People Of Color – now in its fifth year. It has featured over 200 Black, Indigenous, and POC artists, including dancers, poets, filmmakers, curators, visual artists and more. Their recently initiated career as a visual artist has seen them primarily work in textiles, embroidery, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, discuss histories of imperialism and colonization, and invite interaction from participants.