About this Event
Join us for a Lunch & Learn with Kate Hennessy, SIAT Professor and Director of the Making Culture Lab. Kate will introduce the community-based and art-led work of the lab, highlighting a multi-year research-creation and curatorial collaboration with Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Irish artist Jaad Kuujus-Meghann O’Brien that has culminated in an exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. “Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother” features a varied collection of O’Brien’s naaxiin (Chilkat) weavings, as well as their digital translations, which were created in collaboration with members of the Making Culture Lab. From intricately handwoven ceremonial regalia to digitally rendered descendent works, the exhibition is a space of reflection on themes of repetition, regeneration, and return.
Tracing the ancient threads of Northwest Coast weaving and spinning practices through the technologies of today, Jaad Kuujus’s art moves between generations, time, place, and mediums. Beyond the creation of replicas, her interconnected digital and material practice gives rise to descendant works — woven embodiments of kinship with the belongings, materials, and ancestors that inspire them.
Embodying repetition as a form of discipline and devotion, each stitch marks cycles of regeneration and return: to teachings, ancestral knowledge, and belonging within self and community. Through matriarchal lines, Jaad Kuujus’s art celebrates the threads that bind across generations, while imagining futures still to come. (Museum of Anthropology website).
Cover photo by Rachel Topham.
Date: Tuesday January 27, 2026
Location: SFU Surrey Campus, SRYC Room 3240
Time: 12pm-1pm
Event Format
This is an in-person only event. Attendees are welcome to bring their lunch and eat while listening to the presentation.
Presenter
Kate Hennessy is Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. As an anthropologist of media and the director of the Making Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation and production studio, her work uses collaborative, feminist, and decolonial methodologies to explore the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives. She values working across disciplinary boundaries in her practice, including expression in video, photography, digital fabrication, curation, and virtual exhibition. (Website)
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Simon Fraser University - Surrey Campus, 13450 102 Avenue, Surrey, Canada
CAD 0.00
