Our new main space show Striking a Pose by Emanuel Licha is a joint project between Latitude 53, PAVED Arts in Saskatchewan, and the Musée Régional De Rimouski in Quebec, put together by curator Marie-Hélène Leblanc. Licha is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

This week the show is also opening at PAVED—but it’s not the same as ours. At Latitude 53 we’ve got two video works up, the five-part “War Tourist” and the new “How Do We Know What We Know”. Paved is going to be showing two other works: “R For Real” and “Mirages” are a continuation of the project begun in “War Tourist” but with a twist. Where the War Tourist previously visited the sites of actual conflict, separated from the violence by time and tour guides, in what Leblanc describes as a safe space. In the newer works, the tourist (who also takes on the guise of a journalist, a role further explored in “How Do We Know…”) still seeks out safe spaces to view conflict, but paradoxically ones that let him get much closer—constructed sets for training riot police in france, and a hollywood-built model Iraq in a Californian desert. The videos find the edges of these simulated conflict spaces, and so imply their own edges as video, again themes taken up again in “How Do We Know What We Know”.

The two halves of the show will be united later this year in Rimouski, Quebec.

We videotaped Marie-Hélène Leblanc speaking informally about the work at our opening on Friday, and we’ll have some highlights later this week on the blog—but if you happen to be in Saskatoon on Friday, be sure to catch her at the opening at PAVED arts at 7:00. Find out more about the works and the show there at pavedarts.ca.