Due to Injuries…

September 14 - October 19, 2013

Due to Injuries… is an exhibition of new work by Vancouver-based artists Brady Cranfield and Jamie Hilder. This project continues a trajectory in their work that engages what they refer to as the Economist’s Aesthetic: a mode of encountering and representing the world through the forms, operations, and priorities of the economy.

Due to Injuries… examines the often-incidental cultural expressions of finance and economics. These fields typically claim a position of impartiality, focusing on the data of the market, which is often perceived to be objective. Filtered, framed, and marked by ideology, however, this data is regularly instrumentalized as an alibi for complex social relations. The cultural products of finance and economics are not simply epiphenomena – curious side effects of otherwise professional activities. Rather, they also offer unique access back into the social articulation of these rarified practices, which impact everyday life.

The exhibition is presented as part of SWARM 2013, festival of artist-run culture, and is free and open to the public and will run until October 19.

Public Lecture & Programs
The exhibition is accompanied by a free public lecture, co-presented with the Vancity Office for Community Engagement, by Italian Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, to be held at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, SFU campus in the Woodward’s complex at 149 West Hastings St., Vancouver, on September 14th, at 7pm (Seating is by first-come-first-serve and is limited). In the weeks following the lecture, four respondents will deliver talks at 221A in two sessions, Jaleh Mansoor and Enda Brophy on October 1st and Steve Collis and Cecily Nicholson on October 8th, both starting at 7pm.

Throughout August, 221A hosted a weekly reading group based on Berardi’s most recent book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Written in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, the book seeks to offer methods for thinking outside of what Berardi outlines as semiocapitalism, using poetry as a metaphor for resistance.