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Sarindar Dhaliwal is the 2024 Koerner Artist-in-Residence in Queen’s BFA (Visual Art) Program. This artist talk includes a Q&A. A reception with refreshments follows.

Sarindar Dhaliwal’s practice, multidisciplinary but thematically cohesive meditations on childhood memories and the experience of migration, focuses on not only how this affects the way we remember our formative years, but also how we recreate the past using personal and autobiographical narratives. This talk is about the cartographer’s mistake series. There are 11 pieces so far. The works range in time and place, and are set in various eras and geographies: 1852 (London) 1910 and 1948 (Medicine Hat), 1963 (England) and other places: Sydney (2012), Venice, Paris, Toronto and Devon. the cartographer’s mistake is concentrated on a fictional character based on the cartographer who was, in 1947, charged by the Indian Pakistan Boundary Commission with geographically dividing India to create the Muslim nation of Pakistan. As punishment for this irresponsible mapmaking the cartographer is re-incarnated time after time as a bird living on various continents, in many cities, and in different time periods. He functions as the storyteller whose musings connect the world of the dying British Raj to the changing face of multiculturalism in the Commonwealth.