Fall 2013 Preview

Our doors may be closed right now, and there may be paper on the windows, but we’ll be back in September, better than before. We have already presented two projects in our new building at 236 East Pender — IOU and the enigmatic Whatever This Is … — on temporary walls while we cleared out debris and did other work. This September, you’ll see what the space was meant to look like, and the beginning of a new phase.

We’ll open the fall with God Save The Queen, curated by Chris Bose. The title, of course, could either be the title of the royal anthem, a toast, or the name of the Sex Pistols’ anti-jubilee song from 1977. Chris has assembled a group show that may annoy and confound monarchists and apologists for colonialism, while bringing us work by artists who mostly have not been seen in Vancouver before, all in the spirit of the Pitt’s DIY history.

In late October, we’ll have the latest version of our Wrong Wave festival of art bands, music by visual artists, and art by musicians, this time curated by Sydney Hermant. Wrong Wave is a festival that the Pitt originally presented in the early 1980s, and which we revived in 2011 and 2012. This year’s edition is called Wrong Wave: Revenge of the New Puritan, and features a screening of Charles Atlas’s film Hail the New Puritan along with some amazing performances that you won’t see anywhere else.

Rounding out the fall is RE: The Fox, a curatorial residency by London-based artist Arnaud Desjardin, with the Everyday Press and John Slyce. The Fox was a journal published in the mid-1970s in response to, or maybe as a breakaway from, Art & Language. A facsimile edition of the magazine (only three issues were published) will be created and published at UNIT/PITT, and reconsidered through the lens of digital culture and the deepening crisis in the relationship between artists and “education, the power of money and value in art, institutions and their functions, and autonomy” — the issues The Fox‘s writers were considering forty years ago.

We’ll be announcing a few other things as they get closer, and providing some more previews of these three major projects.