Heidi Barkun – CUSTOM RESIDENCIES
Heidi Barkun’s transdisciplinary practice explores the experience of illness, infertility, identity and failure. Her work is conceptual and intuitive, employing feminist autobiographical / autopathographical / autotheoretical methodology to interweave health and social sciences with her site-oriented practice. She confers artistic value to lived experience in social, political and medical spheres, as well as to the artefacts these experiences produce, as a means to critique and subvert normative understandings of the body, reproductive biotechnology and womanhood. By centering alternate forms of knowledge making and transmission, Heidi seeks to foster conversations about these taboo subjects.
Biography
Heidi Barkun is a chronically ill and disabled transdisciplinary artist who recently moved to the Laurentians. She has a Master of Arts in Visual & Media Arts and Feminist Studies (UQAM, 2020), a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Concordia, 1999) and a Bachelor of Science (McGill, 1995). Her artworks have been shown in Canada, the United States, Europe and South America, and are included in the National Bank Collection and the Senvest Collection of Contemporary Canadian Art. Her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Réseau québécois en études feminists (RéQEF). She has presented her research at academic conferences in Paris, New York, Aalborg, Vienna and Montreal. She is the 2020 laureate of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art.