Skip to content
Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Open from Tuesday to
Sunday 12 pm → 6 pm

Admission always free
ArchiveExhibition
1 Jan 19until31 Dec 19

How far do you travel?

Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen, Anna Torma

Offsite on selected TransLink B-Line buses

A graphic pattern made up of a purple, blue and green geometric background with various illustrations of buildings, swirling clouds, imaginary birds and plants superimposed on top.

Diyan Achjadi, NonSerie (In Commute) (detail), 2017-18. Courtesy the artist.

Throughout 2019, the Contemporary Art Gallery is producing a major public art initiative in partnership with TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority. Five Canadian artists — Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen and Anna Torma — were commissioned to graphically wrap the exterior of a series of articulated buses traveling on major routes throughout Vancouver. The nature of this project — public transit vehicles enveloped by visual imagery and traversing the space of the city — offers a lyrical opportunity to explore connections between images, meaning and movement. Buses and trains are not the only transit systems that we navigate in our everyday lives: visual images constantly transport ideas and meaning from one place to another. They link and organize histories, spaces and identities. They connect us with others. The English word commute is derived from the Latin commutare, which means to change or transform. Each of the five artists featured in this project has an artistic practice that is deeply attentive to the commute of visual language across time and space. This project asks “how far do you travel?”, a question that could well be posed to each rider on the bus, but also to the graphic imagery that Achjadi, Cruz, Souliere, Taşdelen and Torma use to interrogate how and why images move and communicate through time and place.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

This project is produced in partnership with TransLink.

Publications & Editions