On Edge

Temple of My Familiar is the name of a mural painted in Belfast by Canadian artist Nhan Duc Nguyen. This documentary situates Nguyen’s art within the political context of war-torn Northern Ireland, and explores the artist’s own cross-cultural search for an identity spanning East and West.

HUNGRY GHOSTS is a collaboration between the artist and the curator. The video installation provides an ephemeral form where interdisciplinary elements from the disparate past are configured with unsettling current issues and produced as a new whole. Fleeting moments, manipulated images, visual clips, still photographs, text, narrative stories, home movies, sound bites, edited fiction and real time documents will be digitally seamed and beamed onto transparent surfaces. The video projections shown in a moving vaporetto (sea bus) will transport both the work and audience on a journey. The time-based work will float by the post-modernism of Venice, a rich port for thriving trade and now in the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale, the international art market converges to make the trade. This work is a site of memory where the very private becomes public. It is a virtual ‘walking the mountain’, a way to honour and remember those who have gone before.

Jazz Slave Ships was a site-specific performance collaboration between Vancouver artist Jan Wade and London-based performer Vanessa Richards that involved the creation of an ancestral altar. It took place in two U.K. ports in October 1996: on the West Coast in Whitehaven, Cumbria (the last English slaving port), in an 18th century bonded warehouse used to store liquor and guns used in the slave trade; and on the East Coast in Hull, Yorkshire in Wilberforce House, the birthplace of the anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce and now a museum of anti-slavery. The production took place over a 3-week period that began Sept. 30, 1996.