Simranpreet Kaur Anand with Conner Singh VanderBeek’s exhibition Foreign Dreams explores how young people, particularly from the region of Punjab in India, are sold on the dream of migration to Canada for economic opportunity.
Toiling in financial precarity, international students fill fast food, transit, agriculture, construction, and security jobs in Canada. The artists ask us to consider the tolls – financial, cultural, familial, physical and psychological – to young people who turn their dreams of migration into reality. What is the cost of their migration? Who wins, who loses, and who pays?
Kaur Anand and Singh VanderBeek worked as Artists-in-Residence at WAHC in July of 2024. While in residence in the GTHA, they connected with community partners Laadliyan and Naujawan Support Network to develop their artistic vision for this exhibition. As a complement to their exhibition in the CUPE/SCFP Gallery, the artists have also curated a related exhibition in our Community Gallery.
View the exhibition essay composed by Conner Singh VanderBeek.
View the interpretive Guide for All Ages created to accompany this exhibition (coming soon).
Download the Foreign Dreams exhibition poster designed by Osman Bari.
Simranpreet Kaur Anand is an artist, curator, and cultural worker creating and living on the unceded territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo peoples (Surrey, BC) and the lands of the Anishinaabeg – The Three Fire Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Wyandot Nation (Ann Arbor, MI). Anand’s art practice interrogates the so-called neutral audience in multicultural society. She uses materials —particularly textiles, language, performative gestures, and photographs—that resonate beyond the typical art gallery context. Her practice is informed by familial and community histories, often engaging materials and concepts drawn from the histories of Punjab and its diasporas and how they have been disrupted by colonialism, forced migration, and global capitalism.
Conner Singh VanderBeek is a mixed Punjabi-Sikh and American musician, pedagogue, media artist, and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology based at the University of Michigan. Their research engages diversity policy in Canadian arts and its relationship to the commodification and tokenization of Punjabi-Canadian artists. Their pedagogy challenges the Western art music canon and foregrounds musical expressions by minorities and diasporic communities in North America, including South Asians and African Americans. They also write about cultural memory and identity politics in the Sikh diaspora.
Join us for a series of ancillary programs presented in support of Foreign Dreams.
Opening Reception and Performance Event: Saturday, September 21, 6-9pm
BTLxWAHC Book Club: Discussion of Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada, by Gabriel Allahdua, with Edward Dunsworth with Sara Swerdlyk of Between the Lines Press, Saturday, November 16, 10am-noon
Virtual Artist Talk with Simranpreet Kaur Anand and Conner Singh VanderBeek: Thursday, November 21, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST
WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE National, the Canada Council for the Arts and OSSTF for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.
For more information, please contact Sylvia Nickerson, Programming and Exhibitions Specialist, at (905) 522-3003 ex. 29 or sylvia@wahc-museum.ca
