MANDATE

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) produces innovative programs and creative collaborations that increase the visibility of South Asian visual artists and fosters their participation in the wider visual arts community in Canada. SAVAC promotes excellence through visual arts programming that critically explores issues and ideas shaping South Asian identities and experiences. We promote cross-cultural awareness and dialogue in order to better integrate South Asian artists into the visual arts mainstream.

We achieve our objectives by developing partnerships with artists and arts organizations. We expose the work of contemporary South Asian artists to new audiences. We assist South Asian artists in professionalizing their skills and accessing resources which will allow them to better adapt to the Canadian context. We develop inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural projects that foster dialogues between South Asian and non-South Asian artists.

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to increasing the visibility of culturally diverse artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development and creating a community for our artists. SAVAC was founded to be an organization staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour.

We promote self-representation by developing artistic practice that is often informed by cultural identity through a range of mediums, aesthetics, forms, and techniques. We support work that (in)directly addresses the ways histories of people of colour are represented alongside the story of ongoing colonialism on Turtle Island and post-colonial histories of the global south. These works are challenging, experimental and offer multifarious perspectives on the contemporary world.

For over 20 years, SAVAC has operated without a gallery space as an explicit, political choice. Instead, as a means of pushing diversity mandates within the Canadian arts ecology beyond the minimum, we partner with galleries, institutions and museums to integrate artists and curators of colour into the curatorial and programming practices of those institutions.

OBJECTIVES

• to provide racialized artists with exhibition opportunities and thereby raise their profile;
• to advance contemporary art practices amongst racialized artists by providing access to professional development opportunities; to encourage cultural understanding and cross-cultural dialogue;
• to advocate for cultural diversity in the visual arts;
• to provide a network of support for racialized artists;
• to develop an appreciation of contemporary visual art by racialized artists in the wider community;
• to encourage the wider community to value and participate in cultural activity;
• to make a significant contribution to Canada’s cultural landscape.

About SAVAC

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is the only non-profit artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to the presentation and promotion of contemporary visual art by South Asian artists.

SAVAC’s principal activities are to produce exhibitions, screenings, collaborative projects, artistic interventions, lectures, workshops and educational programs that showcase the range and diversity of work being produced by South Asian artists.

SAVAC works without a gallery space, and typically in collaboration with other galleries and arts organizations. The collaborative process is important to SAVAC as it prevents our programs from becoming marginalized within the visual arts context. Collaboration is also a valuable process for us in terms of fostering strong relations with the mainstream visual arts community.

SAVAC promotes the visual arts as an important means of developing cultural awareness, integration and understanding.