CAFKA aims to shift community experience
Contemporary art fest will bring region to life with the unusual and the provocative
KITCHENER — The impetus behind this year’s Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area, known as CAFKA, is about getting to know your community through conversations stimulated by contemporary art.
“Art changes the way we experience our neighbourhood and the way we see the world,” said festival vice chair Jen Love.
Love, along with executive director Gordon Hatt, presented the lineup for CAFKA 18 on Tuesday evening at a special launch event at Descendants Brewery in Kitchener.
The biannual event runs June 2 to July 1, in venues spread throughout Waterloo Region.
This is not a festival about putting oil paint to canvas or sculpting in clay.
It’s about expanding on an idea using creative methods and mediums such as wind, sound or touch and some of the creations are not necessarily what audiences might consider when thinking about art.
Think huge blow up cushions controlled by a computer that inflates then deflates in a pattern, or an enormous installation titled “Church” suspended from the ceiling at Kitchener City Hall. There are pop up plays, a sound amphitheatre created with 500 used speakers sourced from thrift stores and a giant walk-in mural.
Guelph artist Dawn Matheson, who works with deaf and hard of hearing youth, has created an interpretation of a work by midcentury avant-garde American poet E. E. Cummings. The poem will be performed in American Sign Language by 9-year-old Guelph resident Nora Stasinkiewicz.
The festival will also feature outdoor works, including a burning stone circle by Cambridge artist Don Russell, located at Rare Charitable Reserve in Blair.
“That circle will be burning for 30 days,” said Hatt, adding “It’s recognizing the Indigenous people of this area.”
Kitchener artists Denise St. Marie and Timothy Walker have developed the project “Community Thoughts.” The artists asked community members pointed questions about how they felt about their community, their fears, their loves and their ideas for improving lives. Those thoughts were then written on large, thought-bubble shaped signs which will be installed on telephone and hydro poles in the downtown cores of Kitchener and Waterloo.
“You can stand under the thought bubble and have your photo taken,” said Hatt. “It’s a way to get the conversation going.”
All the works presented at CAFKA 18 are designed to turn the viewer’s perceptions of art upside down and, given that everything is in public spaces, conversations are bound to happen. And that is the point.
Love noted the works presented during the 30-day event will “animate public spaces” throughout the region, including street corners, parks, city halls, as well as Conestoga Mall in Cambridge. The idea is to add an element of surprise to these spaces, to replace the familiar with the unexpected.
A work by Lucy Pullen, who is creating a walk-in mural for the festival, gives this edition of CAFKA its theme, “Recognize Everyone,” a game she created which only has one rule: recognize a familiar acquaintance.
“It was a very interesting and eventful year for the programming committee,” Hatt said. “There were lots of applications to the open call.”
He described the process of filtering through all those applications as almost overwhelming.
The evening’s announcement included introducing CAFKA’s curatorial partners: the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Critical Media Lab, Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery and Cambridge Art Galleries.
They are also partnered with the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, a five day event running May 30 to June 3, with more than 25 performances. Like CAFKA, Open Ears — and the Summer Lights Festival that follows shortly after — seek the unusual and provocative.
“Our theme is ‘transform, transport and transcend,’” said Richard Burrows, Open Ears’ artistic director and a musician with TorQ Percussion Quartet. “It’s creating music in a community that is thriving in technology,”
This year’s Open Ears will include celebrating the music of composer and retired Wilfrid Laurier music professor Peter Hatch, who founded the festival in 1998.
One of Hatch’s works will have every church in the city ring their bells simultaneously.
“Peter is known for guerrilla sound events,” Burrows said.
CAFKA is also partnering with Summer Lights, on June 9 in downtown Kitchener. The one day festival combines art, tech, maker, games, music, theatre, dance and business.
New this year is CAFKA’s collaboration with True North Waterloo, a conference to be held at Lot 42 in Kitchener, presented by the Waterloo Region tech hub Communitech.
The conference will look at ways of using technology for positive change.