Please join us for the new SCIAME Lecture Series, titled And/Or. “Body and Ground” will feature Jeneen Frei Njootli and Manual Axel Strain, narrated by Patricia Marroquin Norby, for a discussion of art and architecture.

Free and open to the public - Please register for this Zoom event here.

In this online series, curators Viren Brahmbhatt, Ali C. Höcek, and Martin Stigsgaard argue that the traditional format of a single lecturer speaking to an audience sets up a binary opposite all of its own -- speaker/listener, which simply reinforces the power structure between those who "possess" knowledge and those who "consume" it. In its place, the &/Or Online Dialogues will present two speakers in conversation with each other, moderated by a third. The series features prominent artists, activists, and architects from across the globe who will discuss their work and the unique political and environmental challenges they confront.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a 2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin artist working in performance, sound, textiles, images, collaboration, workshops, and feral scholarship. Platform Art Centre in Treaty 1, Winnipeg, Manitoba has exhibited Frei Njootli's recent solo exhibition Small Mounds of Flesh Form in the fall of 2020 and they are preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition at the Yukon Art Centre in 2020. If you are interested in learning more about Jeneen’s work, please check out my auntie bought all her skidoos with beadmoney, available through the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) bookstore. They are represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art and are presently an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia located in Musqueam territory.

Manual Axel Strain is a 2-spirit interdisciplinary artist with Musqueam/Simpcw/Syilx heritage based in the stolen, sacred ancestral lands, water, and air of the Katzie/Kwantlen peoples. Although they have attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design they are more appreciative of the knowledge they have gained from their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and ancestors. Strain uses their lived experience as a source of agency to investigate different ways of healing and knowing. Invested with personal and political histories, their practice includes painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and installation, through which mental and spiritual well-being take paramount significance. They have contributed work to Capture Photography Festival through Richmond Public Art, the Vancouver International Airport, and The Musqueam Cultural Centre, and have exhibited work in many places in the land that is now called Canada. They are a guest lecturer at the Vancouver Community College, where they curated the Indigenous Art Symposium “Indigenizing Higher Education.” Some of their most meaningful curatorial and community projects include “My Blood Can’t Feel the Land” with Gallery Gachet and The Talking Stick Festival, “Resistance and Resurgence,” a 2-Spirit exhibition at Interurban Art Gallery, “Destigmatization and Harm Reduction” at the Musqueam Cultural Pavilion, “Transcendence” at the Rising Sun Gallery, “The Land Can’t Hear Your Voices,” created during a residency as the Maple Ridge Artist in Residence, as well as open studio events at Lookout Housing and the Phoenix Society.

Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha) is an Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Norby oversees the American Wing’s Native American art collection. An award-winning scholar and museum leader, she previously served as Senior Executive and Assistant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian-New York and as Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry in Chicago. Her forthcoming book, Water, Bones, and Bombs examines 20th-century American Indian art and environmental disputes in northern New Mexico. She co-edited “Aesthetic Violence: Art and Indigenous Ways of Knowing,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal (2015). She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.