Rewind: CAFKA.04
Kitchener City Hall, Kitchener
Now entering its fifth year, CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum, Kitchener and Area) is an annual contemporary arts festival in Kitchener, Ontario. Every year, a specific theme is selected and artists are invited to exhibit work relating to it in locations within Kitchener City Hall and its public square, and in the nearby downtown streets and storefronts. The theme this year was "peace of mind," and over the summer some 22 projects from artists across Canada and abroad were exhibited.
The Cuban artist team of Pavel Acosta and Yuneikys Villalonga produced an atmosphere of leisure that became an almost carnivalesque interruption of daily habit with their installation/performance Amusement. The artists arranged 30 white, wooden reclining lounge chairs in the middle of City Hall's shallow reflective pool, and invited visitors to transgress the boundaries of civic protocol and wade into the water in order to reach these oases of relaxation. During the exhibition, the artists were on hand to serve visitors water for their refreshment.
A similarly delicate interruption of habitual absent-mindedness was effected by Music Box Revolving Door, produced by the Canadians Corwyn Lund, Janis Demkiw and Duncan McDonald, who installed their work within the revolving-door entrance to City Hall. It consisted of an enlarged music-box mechanism that emitted ascending and descending scales as the doors were used by unwitting visitors. The effect produced a lighthearted musicality that turned the passage of entrance or exit from the civic building into a self-conscious act.
At the top of the staircase within the building was another work that combined such lightheartedness with a sense of earnest guilt, even legal culpability. All Apologies, by the Toronto artist edmund law, grouped music recordings and personal paraphernalia, arranged in the manner of a home-stereo display. The stereo stand was constructed of granite paving tiles that, one discovers, the artist stole during the construction of the Kitchener City Hall building 12 years earlier. These elements had been used to create a stereo-shelving system at home; during CAFKA.04 they returned temporarily to the location from which they were first appropriated. Accompanying the installation are an audio recording, in which the artist apologizes for this theft and other regrets, and an illuminating display of correspondence between the artist and Kitchener mayor Carl Zehr that enacts the ritual of confession and pardon.
With Light Net, the Toronto artist Adrian Blackwell created an interactive outdoor ceiling that emitted soft spotlights as visitors traversed the public square in front of City Hall. In a performative work titled Visionario, the Cuban artist Adonis Mariano Flores Betancourt walked the streets in military camouflage, absurdly utilizing two rolls of toilet paper as binoculars. Both outdoor projects evoked the sense that, in public, peace of mind hangs precariously between play and festivity, on the one hand, and security and surveillance, on the other.
CAFKA is an ambitious annual effort that brings fascinating contemporary projects by local and international artists to a curious and interested Kitchener public. This summer the result was an exciting and thought-provoking animation of civic experience.
Spring 2005
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