Visit the studios of this fall’s thematic Visual Arts residency at Banff Centre, Future Figurations, which invited artists to research, imagine, and create possible selves and possible worlds, exploring concepts of embodied futurity through speculative futures, science-fiction, myth-making and world-building. 

Visit participants in their studios and see how they pushed creative boundaries during their five weeks at Banff Centre. This is an exciting opportunity for the participants to share their work, and for the public to ask them about their processes. Artists, art appreciators, and curious first-time viewers alike are encouraged to attend. 

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.

Join us for an afternoon Visual Arts lecture with Tania Willard, a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices.

Tania Willard’s research cites Indigenous land as a source of aesthetic knowledge from a specific Secwépemc worldview. This lecture will build on Willard’s research in Indigenous language, land, and art through ideas of “site/ation”. ‘Site/ation describes the ways that land, as a basis for Indigenous knowledge, can be a site of knowledge production and knowledge transfer equal to the value of academic text-based citations. It critiques Western approaches to Land and Eco Art that neglect the injustice of colonial land dispossession.

Drawing on the work of various Indigenous scholars, and organizations like the Dechinta Centre for Land and Technology in the Northwest Territories, Willard argues for the importance of land-based knowledges, bringing these resurgent Indigenous concepts into play with resurgent Indigenous art practices. Presented as an Open Lecture in the On Other Archives visual arts residency, Willard aims to contribute to a decolonial poesis of land.

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics. Tania Willard is in Banff as faculty of the Visual Arts residency On Other Archives, which invites artists to think critically about the archive as a method or '"technology" for re-storying social and cultural narratives.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.
 

This fall’s thematic Visual Arts residency at Banff Centre, On Other Archives invited participants to think critically about the archive as a method or 'technology' for re-storying social and cultural narratives. Visit participants in their studios and see how they pushed creative boundaries during their five weeks at Banff Centre.

Artists, art appreciators, and curious first-time viewers alike are encouraged to attend. Open Studios are an exciting opportunity for participants to share their work, and for the public to learn more about their research and creative processes.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.
 

Join us for an afternoon Visual Arts lecture with Deanna Bowen, a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes films, video installations, performances, drawing, sculpture and photography.

Making Something Out of Nothing: Excavating Black and Afro-Indigenous Life in White Canada

Multi-award-winning artist, Deanna Bowen, works with archival and genealogical methods to examine colonial and white supremacist myths underpinning the development of Canadian national identity. Drawing on her family’s stories as a primary source, Bowen works with oral histories, public and private archives, local histories of early colonial settlers, and slavery records stretching back to the British Empire to assert Black and Indigenous voices and perspectives to the reframing of Canadian social and cultural history. Bowen will discuss her work as it relates to the On Other Archives thematic residency, for which she is faculty.  

Working with institutional, personal, fictional and/or speculative archives, participants in the On Other Archives visual arts residency are invited to think critically about the archive as a method or 'technology' for re-storying social and cultural narratives. Themes that participants are exploring may include, but are not limited to, familial/ancestral lineages and cultural inheritance, oral histories, micro-histories, absence, amnesia and re-memory.

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics. Deanna Bowen is in Banff as faculty of the Visual Arts residency On Other Archives, which invites artists to think critically about the archive as a method or "technology" for re-storying social and cultural narratives. Bowen will discuss her work as it relates to the On Other Archives thematic residency.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.

 

Join us for an afternoon Visual Arts Open Lecture with accomplished Métis curator Tarah Hogue.

What happens when the archive expands to encompass oral histories, embodied practices, land, and other forms through which knowledge persists? What does the category gain through that expansion, and what might the things it describes lose in translation? Drawing from her curatorial work with Indigenous artists, this talk considers encounters with archival records and museum collections alongside practices of knowledge transmission, continuity, and resurgence that may exceed the archival altogether.  

Presented in the context of the On Other Archives Visual Arts residency, this Open Lecture asks how artists and curators might work across different systems of knowledge without requiring one to become fully legible through the terms of another. Thinking through the possibilities and limits of “archiving otherwise,” Hogue will  consider the tensions between interpretation and translation, curiosity and consumption, access and refusal—and how we might create generous encounters with knowledge without presuming that everything must become available to us. 

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics. Tarah Hogue is in Banff as faculty of the Visual Arts residency On Other Archives, which invites artists to think critically about the archive as a method or "technology" for re-storying social and cultural narratives.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.
 

Step into the creative world of Banff Musicians in Residence. This relaxed evening invites you to wander through the cozey, wintery studios and huts of our resident musicians, where each space becomes its own intimate stage.

Experience a series of spontaneous mini-concerts—short 15-minute sets curated by the artists themselves announced on the day of the event—and enjoy the chance to listen, linger, and connect with music in its purest, most immediate form. 

These Open Studios are part of the Banff Musicians in Residence program, which gives musicians and ensembles the time and space to develop new work, refine their craft, and collaborate in Banff Centre’s inspiring mountain setting. 

Step into the creative world of Banff Musicians in Residence. This relaxed evening invites you to wander through the cozey, wintery studios and huts of our resident musicians, where each space becomes its own intimate stage.

Experience a series of spontaneous mini-concerts—short 15-minute sets curated by the artists themselves announced on the day of the event—and enjoy the chance to listen, linger, and connect with music in its purest, most immediate form. 

These Open Studios are part of the Banff Musicians in Residence program, which gives musicians and ensembles the time and space to develop new work, refine their craft, and collaborate in Banff Centre’s inspiring mountain setting. 

All are welcome to this free evening of intersecting global musical soundscapes and pure, unbridled talent! To cap off the Soundweavings residency here at Banff Centre, which offers musicians and ensembles from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds the space and time to focus on their craft, this concert debuts new works created or deepened while in residence.

Embracing music from across the world, the program encourages connections between artists working in different traditions. After the two-week residency, these musicians will have had the opportunity to collaborate with, learn from, and inspire each other and their faculty. This concert reveals the early bearings of those collaborations.

Experience the fresh perspectives of these talented artists as they bring unique compositions and collaborative works to life. There is another concert on March 20, 2027.

In Hand to Earth, Yolŋu song keepers Daniel and David Wilfred recontextualise their 40,000 year old song tradition in a resolutely contemporary setting with several of Australia's most distinctive and influential musicians. In Banff, vocalist Daniel Wilfred is joined by ensemble members Sunny Kim (voice) and Peter Knight (trumpet/electronics). The group creates an effortless rapport that spans continents and cultures and yet expresses a deeply human commonality. 

Joining Hand to Earth onstage is Japanese multi-percussionist Haruka Fuji, member of the acclaimed, GRAMMY Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble (founded by renowned cellist Yoyo Ma in 2000), and Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, a leading đàn tranh player/improviser in both traditional and experimental music.

Hand to Earth developed during an Australia Art Orchestra residency in the remote highlands of Tasmania. The group creates an effortless rapport that spans continents and cultures and yet expresses a deeply human commonality. They will be joined by internationally acclaimed multi-percussionist Haruka Fujii and Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, a leading player and improvisor in the Vietnamese instrument, đàn tranh, in both traditional and experimental music.

These performers join us in Banff as faculty of the Soundweavings music program.

While many contemporary projects strive to combine ancient and modern influences, this innovative and ethereal musical alliance actually achieves that lofty goal – with old cultural ground being respected, while new artistic ground is broken. Hand to Earth is a truly exquisite album. - Songlines

Imagine two birds singing. Their clear, resonant calls sit effortlessly on the air. Two songs are clearly distinguishable, but their sounds intermingle. One bird is a plover, the other an owl. They sit close by one another, heads cocked, listening. A gentle breeze ruffles the feathers around their necks. This image is perhaps the best way to describe Hand to Earth, a unique and beautifully poised collaboration between Yolŋu songman Daniel Wilfred, Korean-born vocalist Sunny Kim, and trumpeter and composer, Peter Knight. - Limelight Magazine

Soloist Haruka Fujii unleashed a barrage of virtuosic drumming. - The Australian

Pura Fé, Haruka Fujii, Maeve Gilchrist, and Mazz Swift are each acclaimed artists with significant international performance careers. Additionally, each are members of Silkroad Ensemble, a GRAMMY Award-winning collective of musicians founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000 and now under the artistic direction of Rhiannon Giddens. These artists represent dozens of nationalities and artistic traditions, from Spain and Japan to Syria and the United States, and draw on a rich tapestry of traditions from around the world to create a new musical language that weaves together the foreign and the familiar. The Ensemble appears in many configurations and settings, from intimate groups of two and three in museum galleries to rousing complements of eighteen in concert halls, public squares, and amphitheaters. 

In this special performance, Silkroad Ensemble members Pura Fé, Haruka Fujii, Maeve Gilchrist, and Mazz Swift combine Japanese percussion, Celtic Harp, classical violin, electronica, and Indigenous and African traditions into a concert that evokes the essence of Banff Centre and in particular, the intercultural Soundweavings music program, of which these artists join us as faculty.