PAUSE x ISF: Artistic Director

PAUSE was a pavilion designed by Alsu Sadrieva for the TED2017 conference as part of an international competition organized by DBR | DESIGN BUILD RESEARCH facilitated by Michael Green Architecture. The competition challenged designers to create an outdoor space to reflect, gather, and interact. The winner, Alsu Sadrieva imagined  PAUSE pavilion as representing the thorny, challenging problems of the world today. Chairs adorn the walls of the structure, giving it a jarring appearance. The exterior can only be smoothed by passersby removing a chair and sitting down — in effect solving a problem through gathering and dialogue.

I secured the pavilion, in the spirit of ‘upcycling’, for Indian Summer Festival, where I imagined it as a hub of artistic and community interaction. I was able to find a home for it, through discussion and community involvement, on the site of the ancestral village of Sen̓áḵw (currently known as Vanier Park). Almost every event at the pavilion featured an interaction between Indigenous and South Asian artists. Special thanks to all the artists, especially from the host nations of Squamish. Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh who extended a welcome to this project and participated in bringing it to life.

Over the course of two editions (2018 & 2019), the structure became a venue, a stage, a backdrop, and a canvas, featuring free activations and thought-provoking events daily throughout Indian Summer Festival. The pavilion hosted art on its ceiling (Debra Sparrow and Sandeep Johal), and on the faces of the stools (Maynard Johnny Jr. and Kanika Sethi). It was also a stage for South Asian and Coast Salish dance, transformation, performance and ritual including Unceded Territories, a provocative VR experience created by noted artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Paisley Smith, engaging viewers in an interactive landscape grappling with colonialism, climate change and Indigenous civil rights.

A series of discursive events called ‘Tiffn Talks' became a weekday ideas series that brought South Asian and Indigenous thought leaders into conversation every day. The range of topics - culture, clothing and regalia, placemaking in theatre, incarceration and creative practive, architecture, new museology, and feminist literature - proudly showcased a selection of diverse intersections in the many South Asian and Indigenous communities in Vancouver, while also bringing audience members and artists together to hold conversation over a delicious Indian meal.

The pavilion also served as a nucleus for a Sen̓áḵw Walking Tour with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh historian Khelsilem through the ancestral village site. It was brought alive by Transformation Tea Party, a fashion-forward gathering curated by Joleen Mitton of Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week with performances inspired by the legendary Beau Dick including a gender-bending contemporary Indigenous drag performance by Bo Dyp, the fierce lyricism of JB the First Lady, and a circle of 13 grandmothers in grandmother moon capes speaking words of truth.