Presented by Information Office

Beginning with the Seventies curator Lorna Brown and artist and possum-skin cloak maker Vicki Couzens discuss the reactivation of public and private archives in the resurgence of social activism within contemporary art practices.

Information Office is an art book publisher based in Vancouver, Canada. INFO projects are built with conceptual and material rigour to produce remarkable objects that translate and parallel artist practices.

Speakers

Lorna Brown is the associate director/curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada and a visual artist, writer, editor and educator. She has exhibited her work internationally since 1984. From 2016–18 she helped to initiate a series of artistic and archival research initiatives at the Belkin that culminated in four distinct exhibitions – GLUT, Radial Change, Collective Acts, and Hexsa’a̱m – collected under the project Beginning with the Seventies. 

Vicki Couzens is a Gunditjmara citizen from the Western Districts of Victoria, Australia, and acknowledges her Ancestors and Elders who guide her work. She has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for almost forty years and is Senior Knowledge Custodian for Possum Cloak Story and Language Reclamation in her Keerray Woorroong Mother Tongue. Vicki has distinguished herself with her interdisciplinary artwork or, as she prefers, ‘creative cultural expression’ and is widely known for her central role in the revival of the possum-skin cloak making tradition which began in Victoria and is now established across south-eastern Australia. Vicki is a Vice Chancellors Indigenous Research Fellow at RMIT.