CAFKA has a full schedule of programming lined up for the fall. We are pleased to announce a new collaboration with the Open Sesame book store 
and gallery at 220 King Street West. Lèche Vitrine: Open Sesame Project Window, will be a new rotating project space at Open Sesame. The name Lèche Vitrine comes from a French term for window shopping, or literally "window licking.” Influenced by the success of Jimmy Limit’s CAFKA.18 project “Photos for Windows,” four new graphic image projects, printed on adhesive vinyl and installed on the glass at the Open Sesame store and gallery will be commissioned over the coming year. Lèche Vitrine has been made possible by a grant from the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.
Our first installation, opening September 22, will be by Anna van Milligen. Anna is a Canadian-American installation artist who is interested in how women construct themselves and perform their femininity. Her choice of media includes fake hair, faux fur, and dollar store beauty enhancements. Anna is a recent graduate of the University of Waterloo Master of Fine Arts program.
As part of the Big Ideas in Art and Culture lecture series and in association with our partner partner Musagetes, on Tuesday, October 3 we will be presenting in Guelph the Zagreb-based curatorial collective “What, How & for Whom/WHW.” Its members Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić organize a range of production, exhibition, and publishing projects and since 2003 has been directing city-owned Gallery Nova in Zagreb, Croatia.
CAFKA is also pleased to be unveiling its new program of art talks called CAFKA Rewind, made possible with support from the City of Waterloo. CAFKA Rewind is a series of artist talks with a difference. Our guest speakers are familiar figures: They have each exhibited work with CAFKA over the course of our 16-year history. Many in the Region have not only seen their work, a lot of us have also helped make these projects happen. Some drew criticism in the community and the subsequent controversies sometimes involved local media and municipal governments. All three lectures in the CAFKA Rewind speakers’ series will take place at the Waterloo Public Library.
Robert Hengeveld will be our first speaker on Monday, September 25 at 7 PM. His 2009 floating shopping cart “Uprising,” and “Ssspun,” his slowly spinning tree in 2014, probably passed under the threshold of awareness for many park-goers in Victoria and Waterloo parks. When they were seen, however, these pieces elicited “double-takes” of both disbelief (Ssspun) or outrage (Uprising).
On October 30 our second speaker in the series will be Don Miller. For CAFKA.14 Don Miller and a number of volunteers took over two condemned houses in Kitchener’s Victoria Park neighbourhood, painting one black and one white. The condemned houses, which were at one time single family homes, had in recent years been converted into rooming houses and had fallen into considerable disrepair. An agreement with the property owner allowed CAFKA to appropriate the houses through the end of the 2014 biennial exhibition. Reaction to the project from some quarters was extremely hostile. CAFKA's Artistic Director, Karie Liao, and the artist and his volunteers were confronted on the street in front of the houses by angry neighbours. Letters were directed to the mayor and city council and to Karie Liao. Find out what all the fuss was about!
On November 20 our final installment in the 2017 CAFKA REWIND series will feature Gorbet Design artists Rob Gorbet, Susan LK Gorbet and Matt Gorbet. Their work for CAFKA.02, “P2P,” highlighted the ubiquity of two of the basic icons of the electric age: the household switch and bulb. Situated at the entrance to City Hall, P2P was a marquee in the hands of the general public. By engaging in the everyday unconscious activity of flipping a light switch, P2P allowed citizens to communicate directly, without the oversight of authority, within a public space. Literally and figuratively, P2P brought power to the people. And then some people used the marquee to write things that other people found offensive, and CAFKA had its first big controversy.
Closing the year, on December 2nd, New York-based art critic and Guelph native Paddy Johnson will come to Kitchener for the Big Ideas series to speak about issues in contemporary art. Paddy Johnson is a critic, curator and the founding editor of Art F City. She writes about art, the Internet, and animated GIFs and collaborates with artists to produce image essays, objects and other unusual projects.
For more information about CAFKA's 2017 Fall Programming please contact cafka at cafka.org.