Surge: First Annual Urban Digital Culture Festival

At the core of this year’s inaugural Surge Festival program are four interdisciplinary media exhibitions which are free and open to the public. Surge also features live A/V events, film screenings, workshops, and youth and children's programs. Weekly performances in our W2 Summer Nights series feature some of Vancouver's most innovative urban DJs and VJs, with all proceeds supporting the development of W2’s inner-city community media programs.

Formerly street-wise and counter-culture, urban art has found its way into powerful institutions, advertising, and art market galleries. This mainstreaming also exposes that street art traditions are connected globally across borders, and open up space to contest the privatization of public space, battles for free speech, while building creative inner cities. Urban art has its roots in the undercurrents of social alienation and resistance to power, and artists can create relevant and transformative cultural experience for neighbourhoods and people of all ages.

Surge exhibition viewing hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 12-6pm. W2 Summer Nights kick off at 10pm. The Festival takes place in one of Vancouver's best exhibition and festival venues, W2 Storyeum at 151 W Cordova, just steps north of W2’s future media centre site in the Woodward’s Atrium. Program subject to change. For updates and new screening and workshop announcements
check our website.

Exhibitions

StoryBox

Five video and sound installations are the result of a collaborative process involving ten media artists and over eighty members of DTES community-based writing groups. StoryBox was produced by urban ink, an interdisciplinary theatre company, who connected artists with residents to develop their individual stories utilizing personal artifacts as inspiration and illustration. The manifold stories held common threads bound to universal themes. StoryBox presents five such themes as representative of the powerfully spoken words by the most demo-diverse voices.

The ten media artists are: Frederick Brummer, Shawn Chappelle, Su-an Ng, Sepideh Saii, Justin
Sekiguchi, Rupinder Sidhu, Lenke Sifko, Cease Wyss, Krista Lomax and Sammy Chien. DTES participants in the media production: Julia Aleynikova, Samuel Beaudry, Colin Beiers, Hendrick Beune, Afuwa Granger, Lenore Herb, Jezebel S. Jones, Quest Kabuki, Bill Lim, Joan Morelli and Antonette Rea.

A solely aural exploration of the Story Box themes, AudioVox simultaneously looks at the relationship between chaos, order and form. [Frederick Brummer/Rupinder Sidhu]

Resistance for Existence exposes four different realities of people forced to hold firm against adverse forces even as they need to shift their perspectives in order to survive. [Cease Wyss/Shawn Chappelle]

Natural beauty and magic have been lost within the distractions of materialism yet we conjure different illusions & myths to help make sense of things in Myth in Magic. [Su-an Ng/Sepideh
Saii]

A suspension of story, image and object triangulate as audience members weave their way inside
and outside the Mother Tongue musings of four multilingual tellers. [Justin Sekiguchi/Lenke Sifko]

ShadowBox presents a random interplay of silhouetted actors with the stories and key phrases from StoryBox’s eighty participants. The results of this 6-month project are revealed to pedestrian onlookers in W2 Storyeum windows. [Krista Lomax/Sammy Chien]

Curated by urban ink and W2, with financial assistance from the City of Vancouver, and produced in association with: Vancouver Society of Storytelling, Raycam Community Centre, Interurban, W2’s Fearless City Mobile, Musqueam Nation Writer's Group, DTES Women’s Centre Writing Group, Carnegie Centre’s Thursday Writing Collective, Life Skills Centre, Native Court Workers’ Saturday Family Storytelling, Ugnayaan Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance, Surrey Urban Youth Project, Gathering Place Megaphone project, Association of Chinese Canadians for Equality and Solidarity Society (ACCESS).

StoryBox Reception: August 6, 7pm. Free. Catering by W2 Cafe.

All Your Walls

The centrepiece of this urban art exhibition is a massive mural installation by the dark, Take5, Sensr and Indigo. Vancouver's lively underbelly of street artists join in with new stencil and graffiti works on the gallery floors and walls of W2 Storyeum.

Weekly DJ/VJ events and battles, plus breakdancing and crowd-sourced culture are also in the mix. Look for special guests, special events, and media works presenting current debates on remix, copyright, and urban artists’ issues.

July 30 to August 28, Wednesday to Sunday, 12-6pm. Opening Reception:
July 30, 8-11pm, Free.
After-party 11pm with DJ Kilocee, Take5 & The Phonograff, part of the W2 Summer Nights series, $5 at door.

Facing the Wind

In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Under the Volcano Festival of Art & Social Change, this exhibition from the vaults of one of Vancouver’s festival mainstays features original art, t-shirts, stickers, posters, recordings, video and live performance.

Facing the Wind is an English translation of Whey-ah-Wichen (Cates Park) which is in the Unceded Territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (North Vancouver). In its early days, Under the Volcano produced some of the first, largest and most ethnically diverse hip hop shows in BC, some of the earliest outdoor raves, and continues to feature the largest annual BC gatherings for community organizations in BC. This exhibition will be relocated (for one day only - August 8) to the Festival site. Curated by W2 and UTV.

July 30 to August 28, Wednesday to Sunday, 12-6pm. Opening Reception:
July 30, 8-11pm, Free.

REZilliance

This exhibition from Coast Salish-based Aboriginal Artists tells the story of cultural, political and social revival and resilience. Through visual and media arts, readings and live performance, colonial policies and practices are challenged. Predominantly a younger population, a majority of urban Aboriginal People find the ‘Urban rez’ to be 'home' and are making and keeping their cultural identity strong. This survey exhibition presents various perspectives from emerging and senior artists using traditional and new technologies.

July 30 to August 28, Wednesday to Sunday, 12-6pm.
Opening Reception: July 30, 8-11pm, Free.

Tags: storyeum, surge, w2