CAFKA - Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area announces its fall biennial program, CAFKA.11: SURVIVE. RESIST. running from September 16 through October 2, 2011.

The 8th edition of the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area’s (CAFKA) exhibition of contemporary art projects in public places will open on September 16, 2011. The biennial exhibition began at the Kitchener City Hall in 2000, and since that time it has grown every year. It has grown in duration from a weekend festival of visual art to a 17-day program. It has expanded beyond the Kitchener City Hall to take place throughout Kitchener’s downtown and now embraces the neighbouring municipalities of Waterloo and Cambridge. Each year CAFKA’s projects, installations and projections are more ambitious.

Focussing on art in public spaces, the CAFKA programming committee has identified some of the most interesting work in contemporary public art and has invited these artists to develop projects for the biennial. In recognition of the variety of strategies employed by contemporary artists to negotiate the complex social, political, psychological and aesthetic terrain of a looming ecological dystopia, the theme for the 2011 biennial will be SURVIVE. RESIST.

New initiatives this year include CAFKA’s collaboration with its lead corporate sponsor, Christie, to develop content using Christie’s new 3-D imaging cave at the Communitech Hub. CAFKA has invited Guelph-based video artist Jenn E. Norton to work with lead engineers at Christie to develop her work Tesseract, will be presented during the biennial.

CAFKA will be collaborating with the 2011 conference of the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA), which will take place in Kitchener the second weekend of the exhibition. The SLSA is an international academic society that explores the problems of science and representation, and the cultural and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Academics from across North America and Europe will present papers and participate in symposia. The SLSA conference will take place during CAFKA’s second weekend (September 22 - 25).

CAFKA will also be collaborating with various organizations who are presenting programming in concert with CAFKA. These organizations include Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge Sculpture Garden, The Critical Media Lab, Communitech HUB, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Clay & Glass Gallery, THEMUSEUM, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, and Sceneverse.