Explore the curated sections

Are we living at the hinge of history, as has been theorized? The last few years have been a period of enormous instability and uncertainty. How do artists help us navigate this moment, reframe the past through the present, and account for history’s omissions and erasures? Platform 2023 brings together large-scale sculptures, installations, and site-specific works by artists who offer shifting and multiple perspectives where history has often provided a single perspective.

The Agora is the central artery of The Armory Show—the name recalls the ancient Greek practice of assembling in public. Encompassing a polyphony of approaches to installation and sculpture, the works assembled in the Agora are propositions for our time. Under the loose theme of Rewriting Histories, this presentation features artists expanding or challenging the historical canon, which is often preoccupied by inclusion and exclusion. The artists in Platform 2023 use history as material, imagine speculative futures, and employ a variety of material traditions as means of history-telling. Topics include the complex histories tied to colonialism, land, and power; the legacy of labor and migration movements in the 20th century; the combining of disparate accounts to underscore history’s subjectivity; and how materials carry their own cultural values and meanings. Although their materials and approaches vary, collectively, the artists in Platform 2023 are invested in world-building.

- Eva Respini

Before joining Vancouver Art Gallery as Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Eva Respini was Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA, and Curator at the Museum of Modern Art for over a decade. Respini was curator and co-commissioner for the 2022 U.S. Pavilion’s historic presentation of Simone Leigh in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. She is currently organizing the first mid-career survey of Simone Leigh’s work, opening at the ICA in April 2023, before its tour across the country. Specializing in global contemporary art and image-making practices, Respini has organized at the ICA such critically acclaimed group exhibitions as Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019); and ambitious solo presentations such as Deana Lawson (2021); Firelei Báez (2021); John Akomfrah: Purple (2019) and Huma Bhabha (2019). Respini has been a visiting lecturer, critic, and speaker at a number of universities, and currently teaches at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. She has published numerous books and catalogues and her writing appears in museum publications and periodicals.

The artists in the Focus section use materials to manifest histories—whether sedimented or surfaced, place based or familial, learned or reclaimed—and to conjure specific futures. Some of the sculptures in this section call for different protocols of engagement that go beyond mere viewing. For example, oversized soft sculptures of Navajo jewelry form the basis for works that produce sound and are activated through performance, while percussive sculptures draw on a lifelong exploration of how the body generates its own rhythms to illuminate the permeability of the border between art and science. Other works incorporate jingles and reference anthems and patterns from the powwow circuit, a mass movement that serves as both a means of gathering for Native American people across Turtle Island and, simultaneously, a way to generate new aesthetic traditions through clothing and dance. The section also showcases paintings that reveal how the pioneers of familiar movements like surrealism sought out Native American cultural and aesthetic practices to supplement their own spiritual gaps.

This year’s Focus section includes artists who blazed trails for others alongside those making exceptional work in the early stages of their careers. Each booth is marked by profound material and conceptual exploration, highlighting the role of the Focus section as a platform for new work and new ideas, particularly from artists whose practices warrant deeper attention and recognition.

-Candice Hopkins

Candice Hopkins, a Carcross/Tagish First Nation citizen, is Director and Chief Curator of Taghkanic, New York’s Forge Project, a Native-led initiative launched in 2021 and focusing on Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice. Her writing and curatorial practice explores the intersections of history, contemporary art and indigeneity. Hopkins was Senior Curator of both the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, in 2019, and its second iteration, in 2022. She served as a member of the curatorial teams organizing, respectively, the Canadian Pavilion at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, in 2019, and documenta 14, in 2017. She has co-curated a number of pathbreaking group exhibitions centered on Indigenous artists, including, for Independent Curators International, Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, which has traveled to seven venues since opening in 2019; Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, at Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (2018); Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario (2013); and the multi-venue Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years in Winnipeg (2009). Hopkins' essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,'' for the documenta 14 Reader, “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind, and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History)", for MIT Press. She received the 2022 Leo Award from Independent Curators International for her curatorial practice, and the 2021 Noah Davis Prize from the Underground Museum.