Live from AKA artist-run, It’s Tuesday Night!

This past September and October, AKA artist-run centre facilitated a project titled Tuesday Night, a live weekly talk show and open forum style performance situated in the gallery. Tuesday Night was designed to elicit discussion and engagement from the audience, and to bolster conversations surrounding topics that are facing the community, the city, and the province. The show brought on weekly guest speakers that brought to the fore new ideas and unique perspectives on issues ranging from the opioid crisis to climate change. Curated from AKA executive director Tarin Dehod and artistic coordinator Derek Sandbeck, Tuesday Night was developed and facilitated by journalist/playwright Joel Bernbaum, actor/musician Lancelot Knight, and visual artist Andreas Buchwaldt. Event host Joel Bernbaum’s experience combining social work and public speaking is perhaps the catalyst that makes Tuesday Night unlike anything I have ever seen or experienced in a contemporary art space. There was an earnest buzz around 424 20th Street West and within the arts community surrounding this project, especially after the inaugural week of Tuesday Night. Anticipation was surely building for what the next week’s event would entail.

The third week of Tuesday Night is where my personal encounter with the project took place. I sat in the audience and the evening felt ripe with excitement, passion, and emotion. The evening featured a forestry specialist, a child psychologist, and candidates from the Liberal, New Democratic, and Green Parties of the Saskatoon West riding. In retrospect, it was fairly tumultuous for the room to hear from each of these candidates. The tension in the room especially grew as the Liberal candidate struggled to answer audience questions and concerns surrounding the Party leader and policies. The mix of emotions and opinions made for an incredibly engaging experience. The show as a whole had familiar elements, but was a unique combination of mediums and expression, as well as a radical environment for this type of open forum presentation. The topics discussed were both approachable and relatable, encouraging dialogue and connection between regular gallery patrons and those who had never stepped into the doors of AKA.

A lot had to be taken into the initial conceptualization and planning of Tuesday Night,  particularly the satirical and slapstick nature of the talk show theme in combination with the serious topics discussed by the guests and the audience. This was alleviated by the host, Bernbaum, who aptly presented himself in a jovial fashion and also respectfully and compassionately engaged with the show’s participants. Lancelot Knight’s musical contributions also elevated the event. As the conversation evolved, Knight created songs that pertained to the issues and general atmosphere in the room. They were then played at the end of each segment, building a strong cohesion between all of the project’s moving parts. While watching the show, I recognized that the gallery space allowed for the event to be more performative, generously benefitting the variety of artistic methods utilized in the project. I believe it was Tuesday Night’s unique sense of risk that made the setting feel safe and engaging.

The work of Andreas Buchwaldt was another extraordinary aspect of Tuesday Night. Buchwaldt, a multidisciplinary installation and sculpture artist, was invited to create an immersive artistic response to each episode. He began this process by constructing the physical set and stage for the talk show. Buchwaldt used materials from previous personal projects and recycled materials, such as carpet underlay, to build an environment that was both sustainable and conducive to his artistic practice. Buchwaldt primarily works in kinetics, creating sculptural works involving computer programming and electronics that focus on the body, personal interaction, and the relationship between humans and machines. For this community-focused and weekly differential project, Buchwaldt responded to the conversations and topics discussed at the public forums. Buchwaldt would take into consideration the main talking points, highlights, and takeaways from the night’s events and add to the gallery space with new sculptural installations that grew and developed as the weeks progressed.

A key installation element that inhabited the gallery space was a chain-link fence that wrapped around sections of the gallery while floating close to the ceiling. This fence carried colourful strips and star-shaped pieces of wood that created dynamic shadows onto the white gallery walls. Buchwaldt’s reasoning for incorporating the chain link fence into the installation was one that holds personal meaning to many. Buchwaldt was paying homage to the act of stuffing trinkets or signs into a chain-link fence during a protest, large scale event, or a tragedy. The objects interwoven into the fence are often from people intrinsically connected to the events, creating a personal connection between several people and perspectives, all accumulating for a particular cause. Buchwaldt viewed these fences as makeshift community memorials, which grow and decay over time.

Since each week of the show would be different in tone and content from the last, Buchwaldt felt the open-ended nature of the project was an opportunity for both expansion and evolution. Within these constraints, however, Buchwaldt would only have a week to respond to the past Tuesday’s discussion. While Buchwaldt considers himself to be politically minded and personally identifies as a labour activist in Montreal, he realizes that he is not an expert in topics such as the opioid crisis, protests occurring in Hong Kong, or climate change. While speaking with Buchwaldt he told me that he felt “that responding to such sensitive and complex issues must be done carefully and respectfully.”(1)

An interesting and socially experimental aspect of Tuesday Night was the show’s dependence on the public’s interest and reaction. The final project could never be anticipated or repeated. Several of the Tuesday Night shows had discussed climate change, and during the run of shows Saskatoon participated in the global climate strike. Dendrochronologist Colin Laroque spoke at Tuesday Night about climate change and how we can participate in reversing the ecological effects of climate change. He stated that the most logical and sustainable way, was to plant one trillion trees. Buchwaldt responded by spelling out the words “one trillion trees” with thin pieces of wood interwoven into a portion of the chain-link fence that hung on the back wall of the gallery. Buchwadlt’s response reflects what the words might mean, and considers the comfort of seeing a simple solution for climate change written out. 

Buchwaldt is also interested in data, and uses this passion in his own practice and for this project. After interviewing three grade 8 climate strikers, Buchwaldt piled 3000 stones in the corner of the gallery to signify the 3000 people that left their jobs and classrooms to attend the climate strike. Buchwaldt’s use of actual objects, opposed to words or phrases, quantifies perception and ideas, creating something concrete to reflect on after the event. Buchwaldt’s use of factual elements in Tuesday Night, focusing on the literal rather than conceptual, was explained in our recent conversation, “Art can often be open, in a good way, but maybe it’s not the place for that here, which I find interesting.”(2)

The majority of Buchwaldt’s artistic practice looks at how machines are changing the way we work, and how minute or expansive the presence of machines may have in our day to day lives. Buchwaldt views kinetics as a way of breathing new life into an object, and explores this by looking at how the body and machines can either relate or work together. Buchwaldt states, “There’s something so anthropomorphic about watching a giant machine arm move around and cut material where you feel like you are really being replaced, versus the photographer reproducing the human.”(3) In Buchwaldt’s installation Decompressions made for Nuit Blanche Saskatoon in 2017, the large scale piece made out of aluminum struts, casters, and electronic hardware filled up the then empty street corner where the Saskatoon staple music venue Lydia’s once stood. This work commented on how the city saw that building and its history be slowly demolished and taken down, this work acted almost in a fashion of resuscitating the ghost, and then animating that idea through mechanics and movement. It was very interesting to see Buchwaldt create work for Tuesday Night as it was meant to directly relate and pertain to the people participating in the project and the issues that they face. 

This method of expression is fully personal, and Buchwaldt would ultimately take away the aspect of electronics or mechanics from this work, instead using natural, recyclable, and everyday objects to create work that still activated the space for people and their bodies to occupy. This very notion is what I believe was at the heart of Tuesday Night, providing a space that valued those who participated in the project. From the hosts to the audience, the project created a space where people could and would be heard. Perhaps an ambitious project on paper, but in practice the magic of Tuesday Night was simply in giving a platform for various perspectives and stories to be told in an environment that respected every body in the room.

1. Buchwaldt, Andreas. Interview with Kyle Zurevinski. Audio recording. Saskatoon, SK, October 10, 2019.
2. Buchwaldt, Interview with Kyle Zurevinski, 2019.
3. lbid.