ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE! In her speech to the (UK) Conservative Party Conference in 1987, Margaret Thatcher claimed that British children were being taught anti-racist mathematics as part of a new curriculum delivered by “extremist teachers.” In Anti-Racist Mathematics and Other Stories, a series of three speculative educational videos, Vancouver artist Byron Peters attempts to figure this anti-bias pedagogy within the lexicon of our contemporary mediascape. Each episode, visually distinct in its playful didacticism and in the composition of its unreliable narrator, is a thought experiment that oscillates between satirical dramatizations and sincere propositions for a world wherein the equation 10 − 3 = 13 expresses an ideology of sharing, collectivity, and mutuality.

Anti-Racist Mathematics and Other Stories is a series commissioned by VIVO Media Arts Centre that initiated with the exhibition Byron Peters — Before and After the Sixth Radar Conference (VIVO, 2017).

Episode 1 | Byron Peters/Canada 2017. 22 min. DCP
Episode 2 | Byron Peters/Canada 2018. 30 min. DCP
Episode 3 | Byron Peters/Canada 2018. 30 min. DCP

Programmed by Steffanie Ling

Post-screening Q&A moderated by Stacey Ho, an artist, writer, and curator living on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Their practice considers intersections of culture, history, and embodied experience from a feminist perspective. They also spend a lot of time thinking about math, plant medicine, and perfume.

Byron Peters is a Vancouver-based artist and writer whose collaborative and solo works take the form of sculpture, text, sound, and video. His research engages emerging technologies, economic imaginaries, prison education, and the histories of science.

Steffanie Ling is a writer, critic, editor and producer of pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments, and diatribes. She is the former Events & Exhibitions co-Curator at VIVO and the new Artistic Director of Images Festival.

Co-presented with VIVO Media Arts Centre

Image: Production still, Episode 2, 2018, courtesy of the artist