News

• Happy 2015!
• I'm thrilled to launch Home Made Home, a creative enterprise to design and build innovative and ecologically-friendly small dwellings for modest urban living. The mission of Home Made Home to make well-crafted and thought-provoking structures that fulfill real needs and encourage us all to imagine other possible ways of living.
  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
  We're beginning with work on some concept models, but ready to talk to potential clients. Contact HMH at germainekoh.com.
• I'm currently working as part of the design team for the No. 2 Road North Drainage Pump Station in Richmond, BC. This is an interesting model for integrating public art into a small public utility building, which will be constructed later in 2015.
  

• Opening 17 October 2014
• (im)mobile, two-person show with Edith Flückiger, curated by Mireille Bourgeois and Chantal Molleur, at Dalhousie Art Gallery
  

• Summer 2014
• Permanent public art project GroundWaterSeaLevel is now operational at Lonsdale Quay, North Vancouver.
  
• Tracing Tracks, an online game for experiencing different spaces (in collaboration with Edith Flückiger) is now live. Info page here, project here.
• Gleaning, a smartphone app about food security, is almost ready for distribution via the Apple and Google stores.
  

• Fall 2013
• Les matins infidèles: l'art du protocole, curated by Bernard Lamarche, opens 7 November at the Musée nationale des beaux-arts du Québec, and runs until September 2014.
  
• The League group for playing invented games and sports makes several appearances outside of our regular last-Sunday-of-the-month gatherings in Elm Park, Vancouver:
  5 October - The n Games at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto
  26 October - Culture + Community symposium, Vancouver
  29 November - FUSE at Vancouver Art Gallery
• Germaine Koh: Weather Systems catalogue, with essays by Sarah Cook and Markus Miessen and Yulia Startsev now available from the Kamloops Art Gallery.

• Upcoming 6 April - 15 June, 2013
• Germaine Koh: Weather Systems at Kamloops Art Gallery, curated by Charo Neville
  
• A survey of works relating natural and human systems.

• Launched October 2012
• League, a new participatory project based in Elm Park, Vancouver
• League is an open group of people who gather to play sports and games invented by members of the public. Each game, its equipment, its playing field, and its strategies are likely to evolve through trial and improvisation. It’s problem-solving as play. Beginning Fall 2012 we will be gathering weekly in Elm Park. You are welcome to drop in. Bring both body and mind.
• League blog
  

• 9 August-8 September 2012
• Toolkit, group exhibition guest-curated by Germaine Koh for MKG127, Toronto
• Toolkit is an exhibition of human-scaled objects that give pause for thought. Made by practitioners of critical design, contemporary art and social action, and existing in the realm of furniture, products and utensils, these are implements — some speculative, some fully operational — that disrupt habitual actions and interactions, and allow us to consider alternatives. Aligning with an idea that change in the world might best be wrought by tools that alter thinking, some of these objects partake of the tendency to make objects increasingly smart, while others are resolutely dumb, reflecting back the interactions that shape the world around them.

• 26 May 2012, 10:00-16:30
• Public Art and You: a mini symposium at MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women's Art), Winnipeg
  

• Opening 10 February 2012, 5:00pm
  
• Knitwork and There|Here at Galerie B-312, Montreal
  
• "À l’automne1993, la Galerie B-312 présentait Knitwork, une proposition de l’artiste canadienne Germaine Koh. Première présentation publique de cette œuvre conçue comme une pièce sans fin, Knitwork se construit à partir de vêtements détricotés que l’artiste retricote. Chaque artefact devient le témoin visuel du passage du temps, du travail et des corps qui les ont portés. Entrepris en février 1992 et pesant plus de 400 livres à ce jour, Knitwork devient un véritable monument de l’activité humaine, du quotidien et de ses limites : l’œuvre ne sera complétée qu’à la mort de l’artiste.—Knitwork a vingt ans, la Galerie aussi. Nous vous proposons de venir voir le déploiement de cette œuvre monumentale, qui fait maintenant partie de la collection de la Art Gallery of Ontario. Au cours de la première semaine, l’artiste travaillera sur place à la galerie.—En complément à Knitwork, vous pourrez également découvrir There/Here, une œuvre conçue en collaboration avec l’artiste torontois Gordon Hicks.—L’installation se compose de deux portes. Sur chacune d’elle, un dispositif électromécanique connecté via Internet sert à la fois de capteur et de contrôleur. Lorsqu’une porte est manipulée, un signal est transmis à l’autre porte qui prend alors la même position. À l’ère des communications sans fil, des téléphones portables et d’Internet, There/Here soulève la question de la communication virtuelle et de comment celle-ci peut brouiller les notions de présence et de lieu."
  —Mathieu Ménard
  

• Opening 15 November 2011, 5:30pm
  
• DIY Field, public art commission for Central Park (Winnipeg)
  
• In keeping with the themes of play developed throughout the park, a grid of 38 simple metal posts containing energy-efficient RGB LEDs is controllable by park users, creating a flexible field that is configurable by individuals for emergent game play and other uses. (...more)
  

• Opening 6 November 2011
• The Grand Domestic Revolution at Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory (Utrecht)
  
• In October 2009 Casco initiated ‘The Grand Domestic Revolution – User’s Manual’ (GDR) in response to an invitation from ‘Utrecht Manifest: Biennial for Social Design’ to develop a project that would question and challenge the very notion of social design. With the aim of re-articulating and exercising notions of the social, the public and the commons, and departing from the grounds of the domestic sphere, GDR evolved into a long-term research platform and residency exploring the urgent domestic concerns of today and the potential transformative ways to engage them. Inspired by the late nineteenth-century American “material feminist” movement which brought about what architectural historian Dolores Hayden later referred to as “the grand domestic revolution” by the communalising of kitchens, nurseries and housing, GDR focuses on the question of what difference a changed domestic sphere could bring to towns, cities and society at large today. (...more)

• FALL 2011
  
• "By Sea, Land, and Air We Prosper" at Art Labor 2.0, Shanghai, opening October 15. Group exhibition with Brendan Tang, Arabella Campbell, Kevin Schmidt, Douglas Coupland, and Germaine Koh, curated by Ian Verchere.
• Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 12 hours overnight on 1-2 October. My project Erraticwill be part of Zone A projects curated by Candice Hopkins.
  

• SUMMER 2011
• MAP SENSE with Germaine Koh and Gillian Jerome
  11 am - 5 pm, Saturday, June 25, 2011
  Centre A, Vancouver
• Artist Germaine Koh and poet Gillian Jerome bring together their mutual interests in community work, urban space, and the sound of words to create an interactive field map. They will develop a system for geotagging images, recorded text fragments and audio field recordings onto an interactive map of a Chinatown/DTES. Participants will be able to contribute to the content of such map, and "play" a path through the map by tracing a path, which the system "read" back by replaying the audio and image fragments found along the path. This project is guided by the principle of crowd-sourcing: putting knowledge-making in the hands of the general public. This mapping also makes room for sensual, poetic and politicized content within reference material, and possibilities for alternative stories to emerge.Using existing systems for public contributions to digital maps, this project involves working with participants to write and record texts, record sounds, and add pictures to the system database.
• map sense will subsequently be presented in the following exhibition:
  CO-LAB: A workshop + exhibition project
  Co-presented by Centre A and Vancouver New Music
  Artists/Workshop leaders: Andrew Lee, Jennifer Schine, Julie Gendron & Emma Hendrix, Germaine Koh, Gilliam Jerome, Giorgio Magnanensi, Daniel Tones
  Exhibition dates: July 16 - August 20 at Centre A
  Opening Reception: Friday, July 15, 8pm
  Curator: Debra Zhou

• ONE WEEK ONLY, 30 MAY- 5 JUNE 2011
• Gordon Hicks and Germaine Koh – There|Here in
  Door to Door
  Curated by Christof Migone
  University of Toronto Mississauga
  3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
  Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
• Exhibition description: A new series pairing up artists for week-long interventions throughout Mississauga. The starting premise for this itinerant series is to temporally and spatially splinter and dislocate the gallery in order to present work that delivers itself to you. An exhibition home delivery service. A cumulation of instant sites. An exhibition of moments. The range of approaches the artists have devised within the curatorial (door)frame will confirm the radical unpredictability of this siteless series. The work might be on your doorstep, in your mailbox, at your workplace, ... The work will be here and there, and there, and there, ... In other words, if you cannot come to the gallery, the gallery will come to you.
  

• SPRING 2011
• Talk at Surrey Art Gallery on Thursday 3 March, 7:30-9:00 pm, in conjunction with There | Here, a collaborative project with Gordon Hicks.

• JANUARY 2011
  
• There | Here, a collaborative project with Gordon Hicks, opens at Surrey Art Gallery on 22 January, 7:00-9:30 pm.
• I will be presenting the inaugural RBC Lecture at the Vancouver Art Gallery on 25 January, 7:00 pm.

• MAY 2010
• Good news! The fine folks at the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation awarded me and Marina Roy this year's VIVA Awards at a ceremony at the Vancouver Art Gallery on May 12. At the same ceremony the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement was awarded to Robert Davidson, who summed up all of the artists' feelings of honour and gratitude with the phrase "My mind is warm."

  In other news, Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design, a lush new compendium from Gestalten, includes Fair-weather forces: level and Prayers.

 

• APRIL 2010
• I recently participated in Heritage Vancouver's inaugural Long Table Social, which brought together people from various fields in the beautiful 1907 Page Building, currently being restored. Hosted by actor MacKenzie Grey, there was a program of films shot around and about Vancouver by the Celluloid Social Club, music by Kick Evrything, and Brendan Tang and I did presentations about our work.
  Here's a review from the Vancouver Observer.

   

• MARCH 2010
• A reading suggestion, just out from MIT Press: Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media. I think this book by the founders of CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss) will prove to be a go-to resource for curators and thinkers dealing with interactive technology-based work.

   

• JANUARY 2010
• Happy new year!

  I'm just back from the opening and related symposium for Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario. Curators Jan Allen and Sarah E.K. Smith brought together a judicious selection of recent work focused on issues around surveillance (the artists are Brenda Goldstein, Antonia Hirsch, David Kemp, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Germaine Koh and Ian Verchere, Arnold Koroshegyi, Ruthann Lee, Michael Lewis, Jill Magid, Walid Ra’ad; Kathleen Ritter, David Rokeby, Tom Sherman, Cheryl Sourkes and John Watt). The symposium Sorting Daemons, presented in conjunction with the Queen's University Sociology Department's Centre for Surveillance Studies, was a richly thought-provoking dive into issues of self-surveillance, cultures of control, and such.

   

• NOVEMBER 2009
• Welcome to my new website!

  It was designed by Julia Feyrer with a database and coding by Matthew Brown.

  Please have a look around, and use the contact form on the _INFO page to let me know what you think.

  Cheers, Germaine Koh