Vancouver Now! Manjot Kaur

Manjot Kaur is the third artist featured in Vancouver Now!, the Gallery’s exhibition series designed to take the pulse of the Vancouver art world.

Drawing on the traditions of Indian miniature painting, Manjot Kaur creates richly detailed paintings of hybrid beings that combine endangered bird species with humans, situated within diverse plant life. These speculative creatures are inspired by Hindu female deities, including Yoginis—semi-divine beings with animal or human heads that embody feminine power, wisdom and transformation—and Yakshinis—guardians of sacred places and female spirits that reside in forests, rivers, trees and caves.

These more-than-human beings act as intermediaries, translating the voices of endangered and extinct bird species. In the exhibition, their voices are heard through a sound installation composed of licensed recordings of the bird species depicted in the paintings, sourced from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Together, Kaur’s paintings and sound installation evoke the impression of an assembly of hybrid beings gathering, conversing and coexisting.

Vancouver Now! Manjot Kaur presents mythical storytelling rooted in feminist ecologies and multispecies kinship as conceptual frameworks for imagining new models of planetary justice, reciprocity and coexistence.

The Vancouver Now! exhibition series is designed to take the pulse of the Vancouver art world. Each exhibition spotlights the work of a Vancouver artist that is notable for its local impact and relevance to our moment.