Performing the Landscape
Zackary Drucker and Ming Wong

Exhibition Dates: September 22, 2016 - November 12, 2016

Landscape is one of the most evocative tropes in Canadian visual culture, a popular genre and a cliché that often insist on conventional and stereotypical representations of the country. It is nevertheless a most powerful subject matter still very much appreciated by practitioners and audiences alike. Generations of artists have attempted to capture and depict the sensation of being overpowered by the majesty or beauty of the natural environment time and time again.

Performing the Landscape proposes to look at new ideas of landscape through the lens of contemporary art, in particular, the moving image. Each work selected introduces elements of performativity into the ‘natural environment’ and links landscape and performance via different categories: theatre; actions; happenings; cinema; music; circus; etc. In all these works the landscape is a temporarily occupied space, at least for the duration of the action at the centre of each piece, and yet it resists the pressure of simply shifting to the background.

Performing the Landscape is curated by Lorenzo Fusi and features the work of the following artists:


Illingworth Kerr Gallery: Miruna Dragan and Jason de Haan, Mikhail Karikis, Hans Op de Beeck, Sara Ramo, Julian Rosefeldt

Contemporary Calgary: Janine Antoni, Cyprien Gaillard, Taus Makhacheva

Glenbow Museum: Bill Viola

Stride Gallery: Ragnar Kjartansson

TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary: Zackary Drucker, Ming Wong



Performing the Landscape is presented in partnership with the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Contemporary Calgary, Glenbow, Stride Gallery, and TRUCK Contemporary Art.

Zackary Drucker

Zackary Drucker is an artist who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality and seeing. Her participatory art works complicate established binaries of viewer and subject, insider and outsider, and male and female in order to create a complex image of the self. Drucker uses a range of creative devices that all strive towards the portrayal of bodily identity, her own and that of others, obsessively infusing visual media, photographs, videos and performance art, with acute, masochistic emotional compulsions. Conceiving, discovering, and manifesting herself as a woman in the wrong world, her work is rooted in cultivating and investigating under-recognized aspects of transgender history. She earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals including the 54th Venice Biennale 2011.

Ming Wong

A well-known installation and video artist in the international art arena, Ming Wong has showcased his works in numerous solo and group exhibitions as well as screenings at prestigious locations including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, House of World Cultures in Berlin, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.  His works have also been shown in many parts of the world such as Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, United States of America and at home in Singapore.