Deanna Bowen will share her research on the personal, political, and playful intersection of family legend, urban violence, and racial tensions unaddressed by the decriminalization and resulting paradigm shift of the Omnibus Criminal Law Amendment Act 1969. Deanna Bowen will discuss her research on the criminalization of Black nightclubs in a city known for its racist real estate, urban “renewal” activities, and frontier status in the struggle to undo the misery of the war on drugs. In this, Bowen’s work parallels that of queer historians tracking why and how and to whose benefit the crack-down on queer nightlife worsened and intensified in the very decade after sodomy and abortion were finally legalized in Canada. A song for Vancouver’s Black nightlife, and a story of brutally forgotten bodies.
Deanna Bowen (b. 1969, Oakland; lives in Toronto) is a descendant of the Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneers of Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. Her broader artistic/educational practice examines history, historical writing and the ways in which artistic and technological advancements impact individual and collective authorship. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her work has been exhibited internationally in numerous film festivals and museums, including the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the Images Festival, Flux Projects, the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Halifax.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019 6:00-7:30pm.
Doors open at 5:30pm and space is limited.
