SuperNova

March 26 – April 30, 2022
Artist Talk, Exhibition

About the Program

SuperNova is a multidisciplinary video installation informed by Rah’s experience as a Canadian-Iranian exilic and diasporic artist. Featuring a series of characters that she has performed as over several years including Fatimeh, Oreo, and Coco, these carefully conceived personas pointedly deconstruct ethnic and gender stereotypes. In SuperNova, the three fictional personas appear together for the first time as contestants on an American Idol-style galactic talent competition adjudicated by a panel of extraterrestrial judges—all portrayed by the artist. While parodying the tropes endemic to reality television, Rah’s characterizations are a pastiche of racialized stereotypes as well as a pointed critique of Western popular culture’s exoticization of the other; from the self-aggrandizing Oreo, to the questionable authenticity of Fatimeh, to the non-binary posthuman Coco who communicates through waacking, a hybrid dance style that emerged from queer and racialized communities in the 1970s. SuperNova will be redesigned as a futuristic screening room, accompanied by a light installation and a bespoke build that will take grunt’s visitors on a Xenofuturist journey towards an unknowable future. An artist talk was held on March 26, 2022.

Artist

Rah

Curator

Whess Harman, Vanessa Kwan

Credits

Accessibility Support: Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Accounting: Linda Gorrie
Administration: Meagan Kus
Archives: Dan Pon and Jessica Fletcher
Communications: Katrina Orlowski
Gallery Assistant: Hedy Wood
Grantwriting Support: Mary Ann Anderson
Installation/Preparator: Kay Slater
Photography: Dennis Ha
Programming: Vanessa Kwan and Whess Harman
Tech: Sebnem Ozpeta

Identifier

2022.0326 SUP

Collection

grunt gallery Programming Archive

Location

grunt gallery (second location)
116-350 E. 2nd Ave, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5T 4R8
Unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations

In copyright. For uses beyond Fair Dealing, research requests, corrections, takedown requests, or other inquiries, please contact grunt gallery: archives@grunt.ca