On March 27, the University of British Columbia (UBC) Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery will host a symposium on “Spatial Politics and the City,” addressing the issues of housing and public space in Vancouver. In two panels, speakers from disparate disciplines will shed light on the politics and history of public space in Vancouver.

The exhibition contains artist Tom Burrows’ documentation of squatter communities in Europe, Africa and Asia, the so-called Skwat Doc, which he created on behalf of the United Nations in 1975. Burrows lived in a squatter community himself in North Vancouver’s Maplewood Mudflats together with his wife and child. Photographs of the Maplewood Mudflats and sculptures he created while living there are also part of the exhibition.

The gallery’s current exhibition, Tom Burrows, which presents works by the Vancouver/Hornby Island-based artist from his early career to the present, inspired the symposium. Among others, Burrows’ abstract works are part of the exhibition. Although he used to work with resin in the late 1960s, he switched to porcelain more recently.

Tom Burrows’ Untitled, (c. 1968) installed in the Maplewood Mudflats, c. 1969, 35 mm slide. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Archives | Photo courtesy of Tom Burrows

“In addition to arriving at very beautiful abstract works, [Burrows] still manages to include some social commentary in these pieces, usually through the titles, though also through the process itself,” says Jana Tyner, who is responsible for Communications and Publications at the Belkin Gallery.

With speakers from so many disciplines discussing different aspects of spatial politics and history, Shelley Rosenblum, curator of academic programs at the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and organizer of the symposium, hopes they will present a multifaceted way of reassessing the history of contested space in Vancouver.

“[The symposium] is part of a larger discussion about global practices of squatting, the relationship between property and capital as real estate and how people inhabit Vancouver,” says Rosenblum.

Global and local insights

Tom Burrows, the artist’s house on fire in the Maplewood Mudflats, torched by the North Vancouver District Building Inspector, December 1971. | Photo courtesy of Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Archives

During the first panel, Allison B. Hirsch, assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, and Lorna Fox O’Mahony, Professor of Law and Executive Dean of Humanities at the University of Essex, will discuss Spatial Transformations. The second discussion will focus on “rt and Contested Space in Vancouver; its speakers, Elke Krasny, a professor from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Alexander Vasudevan, an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham’s School of Geography, have both lived and worked in Vancouver.

“They come with a global and local resonance in their work and experience,” Rosenblum says.

She is certain that the symposium will be intriguing thanks to these speakers.

“I am excited to have them come visit us, share their work with us and think together about the issues that Tom Burrows raises in his works,” says Rosenblum.

While most of Burrows’ work on squatter communities was created in the 1970s, Rosenblum believes that it is still significant today.

“The legacy of his works continues to grip our attention in Vancouver in terms of how we see the city moving forward,” she says.

Politics of space are still significant

The topic of spatial history and politics is still relevant for Vancouver today.

“There is a history of displacement in Vancouver that we’ll address. UBC is, for example, on the contested unceded territory of the Musqueam,” says Rosenblum.

Another example Rosenblum gives of Vancouver’s ongoing housing and homeless problem is the “tent city,” which was established, and later torn down, in Oppenheimer Park last year.

“The tent city is gone, but that does not mean the problems have been resolved,” she says.

For more information please visit:

www.belkin.ubc.ca/events/symposium-tom-burrows-spatial-politics-and-the-city