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Curl Mapped: City of New Westminster X Capture Photography Festival


In partnership with Capture Photography Festival, the City of New Westminster commissioned a temporary installation for the glass façade of  Anvil Centre. 

Situated on the façade of the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, Rebecca Bair's site-specific installation, Curl Mapped, tackles the complex, colonial history of archives to represent that which is absent: traces of Black settlers in this region. Bair spent significant time in the city archives, housed in Anvil Centre, poring over the leather-bound ledgers, reading the handwritten notes, and examining the photographs therein only to discover a gap - what she describes as "a ghost in the space." In Curl Mapped, Bair interrupts parts of an archival map with curly tendrils of hair, which for her is symbolic of heritage and cultural care.

On view from April 1, 2023 - March 1, 2024 at the Anvil Centre, 777 Columbia Street, New Westminster, BC and will be presented as part of the 10th Annual Capture Photography Festival.