Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists

Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists, curated by Amy Kazymerchyk, was installed at the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC from the 7th January to the 10th April, 2022. It highlighted Laiwan’s attention to the material and symbolic vocabularies of print and lens-based media between 1980 and 2000, and featured her early interventions into the logic of the book form and the ideology of historical and encyclopedic genres. The exhibition title references processes related to printmaking, while at the same time speaking to the absent narratives, redacted perspectives and critical refusals that are latent in official publications.

Since the early 1980s, Laiwan has made a meaningful contribution to Vancouver’s cultural ecology through her engagement with artist-run centres – including as founder of the Or Gallery in 1983 – and her participation with numerous queer, feminist, multicultural and visual art print publications, notably with local activist collectives Angles and Kinesis, and as editor of Front Magazine from 1994 to 1997. In addition to the audio-visual works, Traces, Erasures, Resists presents Laiwan’s archive of public writing and community interventions.

The exhibition extended outside the Belkin with iterations of the work she who had scanned the flower of the world… appearing on the Belkin Screen  and installed on the main floor of the Walter C. Koerner Library, 1958 Main Mall, UBC. Additionally, Laiwan’s work can be viewed at numerous arts and community organizations across the city and more widely; visit Outside the Belkin: Laiwan for details.

The exhibition catalogue is available at the Belkin Gallery at UBC, or through the Belkin Bookstore online, or at art bookstores near you:

Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists
2024 / ISBN 978-0-88865-494-6
206 PAGES, COLOUR, PAPERBACK

$40

Exhibition catalogue from Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists at the Belkin (7 January-10 April 2022) curated and edited by Amy Kazymerchyk with essays and interviews by Laiwan, Olivia Michiko Gagnon, Amy Kazymerchyk, Missla Libsekal, Liz Park, Anne Riley, Scott Watson and Rita Wong. The publication presents works by the artist largely from the period between 1980 and 2000 alongside an archive of literary, poetic and journalistic work. Laiwan’s practice questions constructions of self and how those readings sit in relation to languages, taxonomies, images, histories and institutions. Her work unsettles dominant beliefs and structures by holding space for more than one possible meaning, where fixity is not possible. In her roles as artist, writer, educator and activist, Laiwan’s commitment to the necessity of ambiguity has contributed in important ways to Vancouver’s cultural ecology since the early 1980s. Designed by Victoria Lum, this publication offers a platform to contextualize Laiwan’s practice, tracing some of the social, political and personal events that have informed the artist, from her emigration from what was then apartheid Rhodesia to Canada, to her engagement with feminist, queer and race politics in Vancouver, and to her role in artist-run culture and literary, poetic, theoretical, media art and pedagogical discourses.