Sameer Farooq /

Bear Claws Salad Hands

In collaboration with Mirjam Linschooten
Yaletown Roundhouse Station, Canada Line with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, and InTransit BC.
Curated by: Shaun Dacey


Bear Claw Salad Hands repurposes found language from a local souvenir shop highlighting the active commodification of culture. Through the simple act of reproducing the language of the store’s inventory list and applying the names of a selection of items directly onto the station windows, the Canada Line façade operates like an advert exaggerating the wholesale co-opting of culture as currency. The re-appropriation of found language developed into public installations both exaggerate and subvert the ethnographic strategies of representation and implicate such practices into a larger system of commodification utilized to propagate cultural hierarchy, difference and discrimination.

Yaletown Roundhouse Station, Canada Line, Vancouver, Canada, 2016. Photo: Scott Massey Yaletown Roundhouse Station, Canada Line, Vancouver, Canada, 2016. Photo: Dennis Ha Yaletown Roundhouse Station, Canada Line, Vancouver, Canada, 2016. Photo: Dennis Ha