Nadia Belerique

Jule Hillgärtner

Franz Hempel

Jeneen Frei Njootli

Kathy Slade

Nele Kaczmarek

Co-produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Kunstverein Braunschweig, this extensive exhibition brings together the work of three Canadian artists—Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Kathy Slade—at the Kunsteverein’s historic Villa Salve Hospes.

Curated by Franz Hempel, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Julia Lamare


### Biographies
Nadia Belerique received her MFA from the University of Guelph. Recent solo exhibitions include *There’s A Hole In The Bucket, Daniel Faria Gallery* (2019); *On Sleep Stones*, Grazer Kunstverein (2018) and *The Weather Channel*, Oakville Galleries (2018). Her work has been included in La Biennale de Montreal (2016) curated by Philippe Pirote and the Gwangju Biennale (2016), curated by Maria Lind. It has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Tensta Konsthall, Spånga; Kunsthalle, Wein; Vie d’ange, Montreal; The Power Plant, Toronto; and Downs and Ross, New York. Belerique was long-listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award and has completed residencies at Walk & Talk, The Azores and Fogo Island Arts, among others. Forthcoming exhibitions include: Kunstverein Braunschweig (2020), Toronto Biennial (2021) and Fogo Island Arts (2022). She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a 2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin artist whose award-winning practice takes the forms of performance, sound, textiles, images, collaboration, workshops, and feral scholarship. Having exhibited and performed internationally, they are now living in the ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples while teaching at the University of British Columbia. Concerned with Indigenous politics and aesthetics, Frei Njootli is currently welding, sewing, writing, and organizing. If you are interested in learning more about Jeneen’s work, please check out *my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money*, available through the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver bookstore.

Kathy Slade is an artist, writer, curator, and editor/publisher. She works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade’s work draws upon sources ranging from cult films and punk rock music to literary classics, art history, feminism, technology, and labour histories. Her recent solo exhibitions include: *A Dream and a Drive* (in collaboration with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2019); *This is a Chord. This is Another.*, Surrey Art Gallery (2018) and *Blue Monday*, 4COSE, London (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: *Protest and Design*, Dublin Art Book Fair (2020); Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2020); *It’s Never Too Late to Speculate*, Fluc, Vienna (2019); and *Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT*, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver (2018). Slade curated *Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press* at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver (2019) and was Curator of the 2019 Vancouver Art Book Fair.



ExhibitionGuide_Belerique-Frei-Njootli-Slade_KunstvereinBraunschweig_2021.pdf

Two woven tapestries hang on two walls of a gallery. Both tapestries depict imagery of hands holding a book with their fingers prominently touching a page of or inserted in the book.

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A close view of stacked white, plastic barrels. Some barrels are empty while others contain coloired liquid objects or are sealed with colourful stained glass lids.

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A brown hoodie with bold, black text hangs on a gallery wall so that the back is visible. Blue hair emerges from the hood and black fringe hangs down from each sleeve.

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A close view of beads black, red, white, and gold beads filling the cracks of cobblestone pavement. Part of a white building is blurred in the background.

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A small gallery room with three monitors on three walls. On the centre back wall, the monitor plays a video of a talking head. On the parallel walls, two monitors with blue screens face each other.

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Several artworks are installed in a gallery space. Three white plastic barrel sculptures are placed on the wood tile floor. Two wood-framed photographs of a doorknob are mounted on the white wall

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In a darkened gallery space, a single-channel video work is projected on a white wall at the end of the room. The video shows a pair of hands holding a beaded rope.

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Books and blankets are displayed on a wood table in the centre of a room. Two large textile works depicting images of a hand in a book and a reclining person are mounted on the wall behind the table. 

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Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Kathy Slade

Olivia Whetung

First presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery in 2019, Olivia Whetung’s solo exhibition, Sugarbush Shrapnel, will tour to the Campbell River Art Gallery this fall.

### Biography
Olivia Whetung is a member of Curve Lake First Nation and a citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Gallery 44, Toronto (2018); Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna (2018); Artspace, Peterborough (2017); and 180 Projects, Sault Ste. Marie. She has contributed to two-person and group exhibitions at Queen’s University, Kingston (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018-19); Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto (2018); Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2017); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Western Front, Vancouver (2016); VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver (2016); Open Space, Victoria (2014); and many others. She completed her BFA with a minor in Anishinaabemowin at Algoma University (2013) and her MFA in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia (2016). She was awarded the John Hartman Award in 2018, the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in 2016, and is a recipient of a CGS-M Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Award and an Aboriginal Graduate Fellowship. In 2019 she was awarded a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts.


An image detail of a wood veneer panel with a rendering of a hummingbird drinking nectar out of a flower. The rendering is composed of bead-embroidered and wood-burned lines.

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Sugarbush Shrapnel

Deanna Bowen

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in spring 2019, the solo exhibition of Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen will continue its national tour in Montreal this fall, with a joint presentation at OBORO, Groupe Intervention Video and Ada X.

### Biography 
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Bowen is a recipient of numerous awards including a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.


A black and white cast photo from a theatre play with a large group of smiling people standing and crouching in rows. The people appear to be in costume and positioned in front of the stage backdrop.

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A Harlem Nocturne

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in spring 2019, the solo exhibition of Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen will begin its multi-venue national tour at McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario.

### Biography
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Bowen is a recipient of numerous awards including a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.

An image, with a black background and white text and lines showing a section of an architectural plan for a neighbourhood. Handwritten text in the centre reads “CULLODEN COURT SHEL.”