Exhibitions and Events
film still from The Commissar, Aleksandr Askoldov, 1967.
The Commissar
Aleksandr Askoldov, USSR, 1967, 100 minutes.
Shot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, this Russian Civil War (1918-1922) drama sees a pregnant female cavalry commissar billetted with a reluctant Jewish family; they bond as the front line comes closer and closer. The soundtrack includes music by the great Russian composer Alfred Schnittke.
Walking the Debris Field: A Natural History, December 6, 2015. Architectural Model of the Richmond School on Roome Street destroyed in the Halifax Explosion. Photograph by Robert Bean.
The Halifax Explosion
The Halifax Explosion occurred on the morning of 6 December 1917 as the result of a collision between the SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship laden with high explosives, and the SS Imo, a Norwegian relief vessel. The two ships collided in the Narrows, a strait connecting upper Halifax Harbour to the Bedford Basin, and the resulting fire on board the Mont-Blanc ignited her cargo. The ensuing explosion devastated the Richmond district of Halifax as well as the opposite shore of Dartmouth.
film still from Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, 1924
Strike
Featuring Live Score by Mohammad Sahraei and guests
Doors at 7 PM / Screening at 7:30 PM
Limited Seating / Free Admission
Paul O'Regan Hall / Halifax Central Library
Before Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein made this stylized and theatrical film dramatizing a labour strike at a Czarist-era heavy manufacturing facility, utilizing wild cinematic rhetoric and garish animal characterizations.
Dana Claxton, Daddy's Gotta New Ride, from The Mustang Suite, 2008.
From the Vault: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection
The Gallery is very pleased to announce two significant contributions to the permanent collection that were received in 2016. Because we have very limited resources for the purchase of artworks, the Gallery relies on donations, of both acquisitions funds and artworks, to expand the collection, an activity that greatly enhances our ability to foster an appreciation and understanding of the visual arts within the Dalhousie University community, and to be a resource for our local and regional communities.
DANA CLAXTON: THE MUSTANG SUITE
Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, installation view (detail) from ...bump in the night, (Halifax) 2014-17.
Jungian Psychoanalyst Beaty Popescu Lecture
In the current exhibition called The Long Time: 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak, the artists explore their own and others’ contemporary experiences of dreams, nightmares, hypnotism, fear, death, impermanence, urban fragmentation, and the collision between nature and culture.
In this interactive talk, Jungian psychoanalyst and artist Beaty Popescu will address a number of the topics exposed in the current exhibition from a Jungian analytical understanding.
Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, still from We're Getting Younger All the Time, 2001, from the trilogy ...before I wake, 2001-12.
The Long Time: 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak
Since 1983, Toronto-based artists Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have shared an exclusively collaborative practice of performance, video, and photo/text work, investigating the subjectivity and experience of the self, and grounded in social, political engagement and critique. The title of this exhibition, The Long Time: 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak, reflects the artists’ long career together, the time-based nature of video, and the recent digital revolution of the medium.
