Althea Thauberger

Biography

Althea Thauberger was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1970. She is currently based in Vancouver. Thauberger obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Concordia University in 2000 and went on to complete her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria in 2002. In 2003, Thauberger was awarded a Vancouver Arts Development Award and was a regional finalist for the Sobey Art Award. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves interactions with a group or community that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings and books, and involve sometimes provocative reflections of social, political, institutional and aesthetic power relations. Her work has been presented at the 17th Biennale of Sydney; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Guangzhou Triennial, China; Manifesta 7, Trento, Italy; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; BAK, Utrecht; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Singapore History Museum; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Berkeley Art Museum; Insite, San Diego/Tijuana; White Columns, New York; Seattle Art Museum and the 2012 Liverpool Biennial. Thauberger participated in the 2014 Biennale de Montréal. In 2008 Thauberger was one of eight artists in the Exponential Futures show at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, alongside Tim Lee, Alex Morrison, Kevin Schmidt, Corin Sworn, Isabelle Pauwells, Elizabeth Zvonar and Marc Soo.

Critical response

"Thauberger’s […] interest is in revealing […] boundaries, especially as they come to define different social groups. […] Thauberger seems to have a preoccupation with using the entire apparatus of art to examine the extremely complex relationship that people now have with the realm of direct experience."

"[...] works by Althea Thauberger contain social and political allegories with an almost purist and vivid visuality. This is one of the post-conceptual characteristics of contemporary art practices in Vancouver, of which Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas are also representative. What is distinctive, however, is that Thauberger’s practice involves an intensive collaborative working process with a group or community that usually results in a musical or choreographic performance and its video, photographic, and/or audio presentation. The performances of specific groups shown in Thauberger’s works have a dramatic, theatrical quality, accentuated by (un)natural settings. In spite of the eccentric formal charms of these performances, they nonetheless have an alienating effect. Viewers often remain puzzled about the contradictory display of vulnerability and empowerment in the performances. Being “together” in a quasi-collective form can be both liberating and constraining, and here the individual is confronted with the political possibilities of togetherness as well as by its limitations."