Photos from WAP No.2/2011

WAP No.2/2011 achieved 0.2% of the attendance attracted by our primary rival Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition. Given our budgetary constraints and a mere week's exhibition time (not to mention the City of Winnipeg barricading the exhibition's entrance) the show was a great success. WAP No.2/2011 has disappeared as quickly as it entered the world, but if you didn't catch it, breath easy, it's safely in the vault awaiting the day we open the permanent Winnipeg Arcades Project museum of local culture.

Museum-goers were welcomed by a wall displaying the exhibition's three subjects.

Higgins and Main video.

Organizational history of Youth For Christ alongside present Winnipeg exploits.

Edutainment Zone.

Egomaniacal architects, common-sense journalism, Tyndall, Manitoba.

Artifacts recovered from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Exhibit's Open All Week

The opening party was fabulous - huge thanks to Milena and Chris for creating and tending the bar (not to mention hosting the exhibit in their space).

We're open all week, so come check it out. Bring the kids! (Games in the Edutainment Zone will occupy them for hours).

WAP 2011 Statement

Winnipeg Arcades Project (WAP) is a multi-disciplinary collective that creates miniature museum exhibits on modern places and institutions in the city - those things that exemplify the power and preoccupations of our time. One day, WAP will open a museum of local culture, and our current exhibits aim to introduce new material into the collection of this future museum.


This year, WAP inducts the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Youth For Christ Centre of Youth Excellence, and the unrealized water-parks of Sam Katz into our collection. The images come from a variety of sources: the local papers, promotional materials, the internet, and our own photographs, paintings and drawings. The Artifacts are mostly products of late-night missions to building sites.


Past WAP exhibits have featured McDonald's restaurants, the Downtown BIZ, and the CanTalk call centre. This time around, we drew inspiration from Walter Benjamin's 'dream-houses of the collective.' The three spaces of leisure in the exhibit are highly ambiguous: heralded by some, resisted by others, grudgingly inhabited by most. These are sites designed to enhance the power of their builders, yet as they materialize and inevitably escape the control of their founders, their contradictions intensify. Enjoy!