Artists Young and Radul present at Haida Heritage Centre

Two internationally-renowned artists visited Haida Gwaii this weekend to give a talk in Skidegate.

Judy Radul and Daniel Young spoke about their artwork at the Haida Heritage Centre on Thursday, July 18.

“This is something which artists can always do, which is give a talk about their work and communicate,” Radul said.

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The couple each spoke about three projects they worked on from Vancouver to Berlin and Prague.

Radul chose to highlight her piece “Birds of Nicaragua” a 12-minute video piece, first exhibited in Bienal de Nicaragua in 2016, featuring birds and a digital bird song coded from the English language.

Radul said the title of her piece is meant to be ironic and a joke because birds are not in any one place and make our attachment to borders seem more real.

“I was playing off that irony that we choose a national bird for our countries, when in fact birds don’t live in any one place,” she said.

Radul’s piece also comments on the way so much of what we experience is based on code and computer code by working with Terrence Grigoruk, a Vancouver-based sound artist, who took the 44 sounds of the English language and translated them into a code resulting in a digital bird song with English and Spanish subtitles to accompany the code.

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Radul choose to highlight one of these pieces because of Haida Gwaii’s connection to “many crazy and fantastic birds,” as she described them.

This is the duo’s first time in Haida Gwaii.

“Art is the heart of Haida Gwaii,” Radul said. “There are tons of important artists from Haida Gwaii. They are the most famous artists in B.C., they’ve been doing it for centuries and we are hoping to meet with local people and members of the art community.”