In 2010, the VIVO Media Arts Centre organized Safe Assembly, a series of seminars, discussions, performances, and live broadcasts coinciding with the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Over the course of two weeks, Safe Assembly brought together cultural communities, artists, performers, activists, scholars, and poets in an open dialogue amid much political tension concerning the Games and their related urban upheavals.
This response is an experiential reconstruction of this moment by artist Phoebe Bei. Her audio composition culls recordings from the Safe Assembly archive—minor, incidental noises such as footsteps and the dragging of chairs; whispers and other indecipherable communications; boisterous laughter and declarations of protest—to sonically mark this time in the city, when many of Vancouver’s art communities coalesced for collective mobilities, dissent and lasting rapport.
For this response, Phoebe Bei worked with Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen and Helmut Weber).
Untitled
In 2010, the VIVO Media Arts Centre organized Safe Assembly, a series of seminars, discussions, performances, and live broadcasts coinciding with the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Over the course of two weeks, Safe Assembly brought together cultural communities, artists, performers, activists, scholars, and poets in an open dialogue amid much political tension concerning the Games and their related urban upheavals.
This response is an experiential reconstruction of this moment by artist Phoebe Bei. Her audio composition culls recordings from the Safe Assembly archive—minor, incidental noises such as footsteps and the dragging of chairs; whispers and other indecipherable communications; boisterous laughter and declarations of protest—to sonically mark this time in the city, when many of Vancouver’s art communities coalesced for collective mobilities, dissent and lasting rapport.
For this response, Phoebe Bei worked with Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen and Helmut Weber).
Phoebe Bei is an interdisciplinary artist working largely in image-based processes and installation. Her work navigates fictional and existing embodiments of land, and how land is occupied and disseminated in the production of home, culture and identity. Bei was British Columbia’s recipient of the BMO 1st Art! Prize in 2018 and holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University. She has exhibited at the Audain Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, James Black Gallery, and Or Gallery.
The 2022 WEDGE Residency, a collaboration between CAG and Ground Floor, supported five early-emerging artists and cultural practitioners as they each explored a research question of their devising, related to the artistic, social or cultural history (and/or future) of “Vancouver.” In their self-directed residencies, the WEDGE residents each worked directly with a mentor to enrich their projects with intergenerational dialogue and exchange.
