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We’re excited to welcome four artists and collectives to the NOW, NEVER residency at Access Gallery. Through the month of October 2024, residents will occupy and redeploy the gallery space as a site for collective care and urgent social practice. It’s our pleasure to introduce this year’s residency cohort: Sidi Chen, Rawan Hassan, Alex Gibson, and Holding Ground.
Sidi Chen (MFA) is a diasporic queer artist who inquire the relational aesthetics through performance, media arts, and other interdisciplinary practices. Through their research across arts, natural science, and community development, Chen imagines alternative relations and perspectives with the world through mediations by bodily mobility and empathy. Sidi Chen is currently living and working as a practicing artist and an independent arts administrator in the historical Chinatown, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations territories, Vancouver, BC, and the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim speaking peoples’ territories, known as Burnaby, BC.
Rawan Hassan is an interdisciplinary visual artist based on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her works explored the complex relationship between preserving and evolving Palestinian textile traditions, such as tatreez (embroidery). She does so through studying and making said traditions through a diasporic lens. She also simultaneously explores materials that embody the questions of what was and what could possibly be with the textile work. Her hope is that her practice might open up the conversation on Palestinian identity, grief, resilience, resistance against erasure, ongoing occupation and colonization.
Alex Gibson (b. 1994) is a Barbadian born, queer artist based on the unceded traditional territories of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, colonially known as Vancouver. As a non-binary artist, they are interested in queer identity, space, and temporality, where they filter digital and material processes to generate imagery, and archive ephemera through image making, video, and installation. Gibson’s work has been exhibited at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy; Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver; Wil Aballe Art Projects Vancouver; Tomato Mouse, New York; Artists Alliance, Bridgetown, Barbados. They hold an MFA from the University of British Columbia.
Holding Ground is a collaborative project of Cait Gentle (Gentle Geographies) and Sarah Comyn (Time & Times) - emerging from the compost pile of Hives for Humanity (2012 - 2024), a community-serving non-profit which we grew alongside the Healing Garden at 117 East Hastings Street. We make a commitment at the beginning of our year to: Work within our body-limits in our organizing: To resist burn-out and to feel the fullness of griefjoy as an antidote and accountability to ever-present influences of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Eat with the ecosystem: To use the medicines we carry, and to release, compost and de-compose that which is no longer of use. Practice ways of being in relationships: To resist extractive and transactional models of being in formation together with human and more than human.