Join us on Thursday, June 26 for the Star Witnesses Opening Celebration.

Doors at 7:00pm

Remarks 7:30pm

Followed by a live performance by Ruby Singh. From celestial to cellular, this interdisciplinary artist will guide audiences on an immersive audio-visual pilgrimage into the vast spectrum of existence.

RSVPs are helpful

Star Witnesses is on view at The Polygon June 27 – September 28.

About Ruby Singh
Ruby Singh is a multi-award-winning transdisciplinary artist, performer, composer, and producer residing on the unceded lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Nations (Vancouver, BC). His body of work, which spans music, poetry, photography, and film, is a journey through themes of ecology, migration, interdependence, and justice, connecting audiences to myth, memory, and speculative visions of the future. Drawing from the sights and sonic textures of both the natural and cosmic realms, Singh plays within the harmonies of distant celestial bodies with the familiar rhythms of rain, dawn choruses of birds, and the pulse of urban life. This fusion of sounds allows Singh to create immersive, hybrid compositions that speak to the layered complexity of human experience.
www.rubysingh.ca

About the Exhibition

Participating artists: Daniel Boyd, Vija Celmins, David Horvitz, Bouchra Khalili, Judy Radul, Thomas Ruff, Carrie Mae Weems, Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber), Paul Wong.

Star Witnesses assembles works by a constellation of artists whose insightful observations of the cosmos bring new understandings of exploratory and migratory movements on Planet Earth. The artists involved deftly combine newly produced images showing planets, moons, constellations in distant galaxies, and the light of our closest star – the Sun – to address earthly concerns.

The title alludes to the artists’ precise visions – honed at the technical limits of photography – and to how encounters with their artworks may transform audiences into ‘star witnesses’ in turn. Certain works in the exhibition evolve in close dialogue with scientific imaging, while others go beyond or deviate from the focus of telescopic cameras, the logic of astronomy, and the path of satellites. Together, they attest to the fact that there is no universal way of gazing at the universe.

Each work offers the image of the cosmos as material evidence for a distinctive perspective, worldview, or imaginary.  They give substance to vital histories, which struggle to see the proverbial light of day: one woman’s survival in an internment camp; one man’s narrow escape from a racist mob; underexposed connections between war in West Asia and peace in a mid-sized German town; an artist’s moment of grace on top of a moonlit mountain, far from home.

Questions of POV are paramount: much depends on where on Earth we – the humans, the stardust – were born and where we have travelled, migrated, settled recently, or remained for generations, if not millennia. Dark matter abounds. And this too is evidence awaiting fresh interpretations.

Curated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator

Generously supported by:
Jeffrey Boone and David Wong
Brigitte and Henning Freybe
Coleen and Howard Nemtin
Michael and Inna O’Brian Family Foundation
Paula Palyga and David Demers
Andy Sylvester
Terrence and Lisa Turner
Bruno Wall

Community Partner:
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

Banner Image: Daniel Boyd, History is Made at Night, installation view, 2013. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the artist, Carriageworks, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.