Strategies of Assembly presents print matter documenting over four decades of social, cultural and political life in this province, drawn from two collections held by SFU’s Special Collections & Rare Books: an expansive poster archive collected by Perry Giguere (aka “Perry the Poster Man”), and a series of photographs taken for the weekly Vancouver labour newspaper, the Pacific Tribune. A singular print by Black Canadian artist Deanna Bowen punctuates the installation.

Viewed together, these materials not only offer an historical overview of social life in BC. They also highlight enduring contentions between differing visions of the social itself, expressed through demands for better living conditions, struggles for fair wages and working hours, transparency in public spending, Indigenous sovereignty, ecological preservation, and freedom of expression.

Any such history of social gatherings is also, by definition, a history of exclusions. It is a history of those unable or unallowed to gather, and of those whose gatherings have been permitted under “special conditions,” never far from the threat of sanction, discipline, and violence. It is a history of events whose documentations, if any, survive in forms inaccessible here.