Slow Social #2 and #3

Join our team in crocheting, knotting and knitting a set piece for our travelling Slow Practice installation, bring your own craft work, or catch up on some social coziness as we move through the dark months. We’ll provide materials and a beginner’s lesson at the start of the event.

For this edition we'll be hearing selections from Freedom is a Constant Struggle, by Angela Davis (2015), alongside musical performance by Julia Ulehla.

Featuring Aram Bajakian, Mx. Bukuru, Sena Cleave, Megan Lane and Kinar Saragih (Kira).

For purposes of documentation, this event may be photographed, audio recorded, and/or filmed. By attending this event, you consent to such recording media and its release, publication, exhibition, or reproduction.

about the artists

Aram Bajakian

The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian music has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots, July 2017), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective, January 2017), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader, January 2018). As a guitarist, “the virtuosic jack of all trades” (Village Voice, May 2015) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Diana Krall, Madeleine Peyroux, and John Zorn, performing at many of the world’s greatest venues, including Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, the Acropolis, L’Olympia, as well as the Montreaux, Newport, Monterey and Antibes jazz festivals, among others. From 2018-2021 Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. Bajakian is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UBC where his research focuses on the role of music in contemporary and historic Armenian communities.

Mx. Bukuru

The name is Mx Bukuru, a melanated, nonbinary, draglesque, fantasy being from your most titillating dreams. With a tight lip sync and loose legs, their performance will leave you bound (and gagged) and begging for more. Remember, it’s: B-U-K-U-R-U and if you don’t know what it means honey, look it up.

Sena Cleave

Sena Cleave is an artist living and working on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, or Vancouver, Canada. They are mixed Japanese and British. Working across text, sculpture, and photographic image-making, Cleave explores the slippage that occurs when materials travel between cultural sites. They pilfer cultural matter from everyday life and repurpose it to address issues of legibility and hybridity in Japanese Canadian experiences. The found matter (which includes objects, images, and textual passages) become recontextualized among one another and, together, they generate something that resembles a whole — one that is jumbled and misbehaving. Together with artist Debbie Chan, Cleave runs The Couch, a mobile art space inspired by carpenter ants to ‘infest’ art infrastructures and platform emerging artists.

Megan Lane

Megan Lane is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Vancouver area with experience in theatre as a technician, a set designer, a performer, and as a puppet maker and puppeteer. Outside of theatre, she is also interested in clothing design, textiles, furniture design, woodworking, visual art, and whatever other creative medium she can get her hands on. Megan graduated from the Stagecraft and Event Technology program at Douglas College in 2019, and from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts with a BFA in Theatre Production and Design. Currently, she is exploring subjects such as design led creation in performance, devised theatre, tactility within contemporary performance, the intersection between design and performance, interdisciplinarity, and non hierarchical collaboration. Her credits include "Scheherazade" (Vancouver Orchestra), "The Frontliners" (Fringe Festival) and "The Tempest" (Carousel Theatre for Young People). As she moves forward in her artistic journey, Megan is excited to explore all that is to be learned and discovered within the lifelong practice of creativity. Megan is grateful to be living, learning, working, and creating on unceded Tsawwassen, Stó:lō, Kwantlen, Stz’uminus, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish territory.

Kinar Saragih (Kira)

Kinar Saragih (Kira) is a textile-based artist who primarily works with crochet and is interested in installations and sculptural forms. Saragih studies traces of human life in non-human forms of existence to contemplate the cosmos through an anti-anthropocentric lens. Operating between the micro and the macro, she invites viewers to explore ideas of what it means to exist within the boundaries of our external and internal spaces, our materialism and the systems of life we are a part of. Born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, Saragih currently resides in so-called Vancouver, BC. She is a current undergraduate student studying Visual Arts at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU.

Presented by The Only Animal, The Public Swoon, and SFU School for the Contemporary Arts.