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!