Founded in 2008, Surrey Art Gallery's Sound Thinking Symposium returns. The symposium features leading sound artists, scholars, and researchers in the field of sound studies, along with visual artists who use sound as key components of their practice, as well as musicians who experiment with the limits of music and sound.

This year's Sound Thinking Symposium features artists from Surrey Art Gallery's Ground Signals exhibit, including alumni Peter Morin ('01) and Charlene Vickers ('94).

The theme of the 2017 Sound Thinking Symposium is Sounds for Action. Canada’s colonial visual culture has been overwhelmingly defined by landscape painting and photography. In recent decades, however, artists have developed alternative forms of sensory apparatus to create a perception of the land that transcends the purely visual. These artworks question preconceptions about identity and colonial history. They conceive of the land as embodied and interlaced with power relations, reflecting upon these dynamics and situating the viewer in an immersive relationship to the world around them. Sound Thinking 2017: Sounds for Action features over a half-dozen artist presentations, along with live performance and group discussion that examines these questions and practices.

The presenters in Sounds for Action examine the relationships between identity and place, memory and history, performance and ritual, language and song, and local and global. Traces left on the land by lived experience, or industrial incursion, are as important as art-historical legacies embodied in the pictures of nationhood typically found throughout art history.

Sounds for Action seeks to foreground the importance of art in addressing both colonial history and our current colonial present. The convening of these talks and performances is inspired, in part, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Calls to Action,” intended to further reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous peoples. How do we as citizens, as artists, embody this shift? How do we manifest these discussions and further real change beyond the required policy changes and institutional transformations? This symposium includes a diverse array of artistic practices rooted in sound, song, speech and performance that address these and other urgent themes grounded in the land.