Diyan Achjadi and Cindy Mochizuki
Curated by Katherine Dennis
September 25 – November 18, 2018
Memories of the Future III Online Catalogue (PDF)
In response to the history and domestic setting of the Roedde House—built in 1893 and originally home to the family of Gustav Roedde, one of Vancouver’s first bookbinders—artists Diyan Achjadi and Cindy Mochizuki mark and inscribe the Roedde House Museum with reimagined narratives. The artists each consider an element of the museum’s print history, including the Roedde’s successful printing business and the decorative arts typical of the late 19th century. Inserting their artworks within the period rooms, the artists interrupt the museum’s dominant story of a middle-class European immigrant family and speak to Canada’s difficult colonial history, which continues to shape the nation’s present.
Memories of the Future III features an installation of prints and a collection of textiles by Achjadi and a new experimental dance film by Mochizuki that collapse fact and fiction and interweave official and counter histories. This exhibition is the third in a series of projects inviting contemporary artists to create artworks in response to the traditional stories told by historic house museums in Canada. Through a range of mediums and approaches these site-specific interventions explore the layered and hidden stories of our social and material histories. Using the visual language of the present and speculating on possibilities for the future, memories of the distant past are newly exposed, interpreted and remembered.
Memories of the Future borrows its title from a controversial collection of essays by Ukrainian-born writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Written in the 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky’s subversive essays were censored by Soviet authorities, and it was only after his death that his writing was republished to critical acclaim. As the reference suggests, Memories of the Future offers a form of cultural excavation that attempts to uncover buried stories and forgotten histories.
About the artists:
Diyan Achjadi’s work responds to the ways that cross-cultural contaminations are visualized in popular illustration and decorative art practices. Using drawing, printmaking and animation, she constructs fictional tableaus to explore the impact of historical interactions on contemporary sociopolitical contexts. She has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of a 2017 artist-initiated public-art commission from the City of Vancouver. Achjadi was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to a West Javanese father and an English Canadian mother, and spent her childhood moving between Jakarta, Hong Kong, London and Washington, DC. She received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art (New York) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal). She lives and works in Vancouver, and is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation and drawing. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its relationship to site-specificity, invisible histories, archives and memory work. Her artistic process moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, chance, improvisation and engaging communities. She has exhibited and screened her work in Canada, the US and Asia. In 2015, she received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Film and New Media from the City of Vancouver. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She lives and works in Vancouver.
Memories of the Future was collaboratively conceived and developed by curators Noa Bronstein and Katherine Dennis. The exhibition Memories of the Future III at the Roedde House Museum is the sole curatorial work of Katherine Dennis.
Memories of the Future respectfully recognizes that this exhibition takes place on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
We are grateful for the support of the Government of British Columbia, the British Columbia Arts Council and the City of Vancouver.
