Walled Off: The Politics of Engagement

FOUNDERS’ GALLERY, Calgary AB - Feb 1 - May 20
By Michael Turner
In keeping with the Founders’ mandate of “exploring human conflict worldwide through projects by local, international, historic and contemporary artists that challenge viewers’ knowledge of and interaction with war,” University of Calgary art historian and guest curator Dona Schwartz has assembled Walled Off. Featuring the work of Peter van Agtmael, Edmund Clark, Paula Luttringer and the NOOR Za’atari Project (Nina Berman, working with Andrea Bruce, Alixandra Fazzina and the late Stanley Greene), the exhibition recognizes “captivity,” in all its forms, as “the ultimate denial of freedom.” 
For his 2016 series In the Shadow of Trump’s Wall, US photographer Peter van Agtmael visited the Texas towns of Laredo and Brownsville to document the symbolic impact of the US government’s 18-foot-high “partial walls” on local populations. In Guantánamo: If the Light Goes Out, Camp 1 (2010), the UK’s Edmund Clark provides a digital chromogenic print of an empty, if not oxymoronic, “exercise cage” taken at dusk. Argentinian Paula Luttringer’s contributions include El Lamento de los Muros (The Wailing of the Walls) (2000-2005), an inkjet print that presents the cage at its most ambiguous.
Events include lectures and a gallery tour with Schwartz and Clark. 
Opening in conjunction with the Exposure Photography Festival
Curator’s tour Feb 3, 2pm
founders.ucalgary.ca