Between Us

A moving remembrance of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic using photographs, first-hand accounts and augmented-reality-accessible video portraits that are at once universal and deeply personal.

Courage wears many faces. On March 14, 2020, at the outset of a global pandemic, artist Adad Hannah took to the streets of Vancouver to record this pivotal moment in time. Over the span of a year he created 237 tableaux-vivants of everyday people that capture our heart, our solidarity, and our resilience. Between Us presents our shared experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic through a series of photographs, first-hand accounts, and augmented-reality-accessible video portraits.

Hannah’ s series captures the trajectories of our experiences, from the first weeks of uncertainty in our homes, to the societal ruptures brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter movement, to our hesitant and choreographed returns to and retreats from work and school, to vaccine rollouts.

Day after day, Hannah travelled the streets of Vancouver inviting sitters to record their experiences in the moment. Each sitter participated in a three-part artwork that included a video portrait or a tableau vivant, a still photograph and a short interview about their experience of COVID-19. For the primary expression of the series, the tableaux vivants, Hannah asked sitters to remain still for thirty seconds while he created a video. In the studio, he worked with composers Brigitte Dajczer and Daniel Ingram to create individual soundscapes for each video.

With unique sound compositions that can be uplifting, unsettling or serene, alongside personal narratives from his sitters, Hannah’ s series personifies our varied emotional journeys. Readers can access the video portraits and soundscapes through their mobile devices using groundbreaking augmented-reality technology embedded invisibly in each photograph.

Adad Hannah creates epochal, serial artworks through installations, video, and photography. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and an MFA and a PhD from Concordia University. His work has been recently exhibited across Canada and internationally and is represented in public collections globally. He has won a number of awards, including the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding mid-career artists in 2009. He was born in New York and has called Vancouver, BC, home for many years. India Rael Young is the curator of art and images at the Royal BC Museum and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. Young's scholarship and exhibitions trace North American art histories through feminist, decolonial, and critical race frameworks. Her curatorship has brought exhibitions of media arts to museums and galleries internationally. Young holds a BA from Eugene Lang College, the New School, and a PhD in art history from the University of New Mexico. Daniel Ingram is an award-winning, five-time Emmy-nominated Canadian songwriter and composer. He has written songs for stars such as Emily Blunt, Zoey Saldana, Kristin Chenoweth, Lena Hall, Weird Al Yankovic, Rachel Bloom, and many others, as well as scoring hundreds of episodes of television. Brigitte Dajczer is a highly versatile and award-winning composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who creates music for film, games, television, and streaming media. Firmly rooted in years of experience touring, performing, and scoring as the performing artist Briga, her work spans across many genres: from orchestral, to electronic, to songwriting, to eastern European and Balkan folk music, and more.