Learn more about artists’ Simranpreet Kaur Anand and Conner Singh VanderBeek and their exhibition, Foreign Dreams, currently open at WAHC until December 14.
Foreign Dreams explores how young people from Punjab are sold on the dream of migrating to Canada only to be met with exploitation and legal and financial precarity. Anand and VanderBeek discuss the process of reading these contemporary issues through historical labour movements led by Punjabis in Canada. Moderated by Sylvia Nickerson.
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 ethnomusicologist based at Davidson College on the traditional lands of the Catawba. 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. VanderBeek holds a MM in South Asian Studies and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan.
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
