Fall 2024 Programming at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre

Simranpreet Kaur Anand with Conner Singh VanderBeek, Detail of Paper Weaving #1 (2024), woven photo printed canvas, 40″ x 28″, Collection of the Artists.

This season, WAHC presents an exhibition resulting from an artist residency with accompanying community engagement by artist Simranpreet Kaur Anand, with Conner Singh VanderBeek

Foreign Dreams

September 13 – December 14, 2024
Opening Reception and Performance: Saturday September 21, 6 – 9pm
CUPE/SCFP Gallery | Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Hamilton

Simranpreet Kaur Anand with Conner Singh VanderBeek’s exhibition Foreign Dreams explores how young people, particularly from the region of Punjab in India, are sold on the dream of migration to Canada for economic opportunity. Toiling in financial precarity, international students fill fast food, transit, agriculture, construction, and security jobs in Canada. The artists ask us to consider the tolls – financial, cultural, familial, physical and psychological – to young people who turn their dreams of migration into reality. What is the cost of their migration? Who wins, who loses, and who pays?

Kaur Anand and Singh VanderBeek worked as artists-in-residence at WAHC in July of 2024. While in residence in the GTHA, they connected with community partners Laadiyan and Naujawan Support Network to develop their artistic vision for this exhibition.

Simranpreet Kaur Anand is an artist, curator, and cultural worker creating and living on the unceded territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo peoples (Surrey, BC) and the lands of the Anishinaabeg – The Three Fire Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pota-watomi Nations, as well as the Wyandot Nation (Ann Arbor, MI). Anand’s art practice interrogates the so-called neutral audience in multicultural society. She uses materials –particularly textiles, language, performative gestures, and photographs – that resonate beyond the typical art gallery context. Her practice is informed by familial and community histories, often engaging materials and concepts drawn from the histories of Punjab and its diasporas and how they have been disrupted by colonialism, forced migration, and global capitalism.

Conner Singh VanderBeek is a mixed Punjabi-Sikh and American musician, pedagogue, media artist, and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology based at the University of Michigan. Their research engages diversity policy in Canadian arts and its relationship to the commodification and tokenization of Punjabi-Canadian artists. Their pedagogy challenges the Western art music canon and foregrounds musical expressions by minorities and diasporic communities in North America, including South Asians and African Americans. They also write about cultural memory and identity politics in the Sikh diaspora.

Join us for a series of ancillary programs presented in support of Foreign Dreams.

Opening Reception and Performance
Saturday, September 21, 6 – 9pm

BTLxWAHC Book Club: Discussion of Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada, by Gabriel Allahdua, with Edward Dunsworth with Sara Swerdlyk of Between the Lines Press
Saturday, November 16, 10am – 12pm

Virtual Artist Talk with Simranpreet Kaur Anand and Conner Singh VanderBeek
Thursday, November 21, 6:30 – 8:30pm EST

Red Tree Artist Collective, Santiago, from the series Simcoe Project (2005-2007), photography, 16″ x 20″.

Foreign Dreams

September 13 – December 14, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday September 21, 6 – 9pm
Community Gallery | Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Hamilton

As part of their artist residency, Simranpreet Kaur Anand with Conner Singh VanderBeek have curated a community exhibition of visual art, Foreign Dreams, in our Community Gallery presented in conjunction with community partners Laadiyan and Naujawan Support Network.

This exhibition includes photographic and media arts work by community artists Sunny Arora, Alejandro Franco Briones, Red Tree Artist Collective, Santosh Chandra Sekar and Jujhar Singh. It highlights objects from WAHC’s historical and permanent collection connected to the history of migrant workers in Canada, as well as documentation of Kaur Anand and Singh VanderBeek’s engagement with Punjabi community activists and advocates while in Ontario.

Simranpreet Kaur Anand and Conner Singh VanderBeek’s residency at WAHC is generously supported by the incite Foundation for the Arts

This fall, join us for our monthly all ages program, Second Saturdays!

Second Saturdays are for families to relax, explore and play. From 1-4pm on the second Saturday of the month, drop in to experience free all ages activities at the museum led by special guest artists. Each program elaborates on and explores themes related to our fall exhibitions.

Second Saturdays are supported by the Hamilton Steelworkers Area Council, in partnership with USW’s Family and Community Education Fund.

WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE National, the Canada Council for the Arts and OSSTF for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.

Workers Arts & Heritage Centre
51 Stuart Street
Hamilton, Ontario L8L 1B5
www.wahc-museum.ca

Workers Arts and Heritage Centre is accessible. For more information, visit wahc-museum.ca/accessibility.

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