Holly Ward’s version of Albrecht Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants | Photo by Simon Yee

Across the street from Kingsgate Mall on East Broadway St. in Vancouver, passersby may have noticed a black flag erected on an empty lot, with various foods in quarter bushel baskets, such as potatoes and squashes, surrounding it. It iss Vancouver-based artist Holly Ward’s way of raising attention to the issues of land use and space in the city’s real estate dynamics. 

With help from Western Front Society’s Urgent Imagination initiative and a German Renaissance artist, Ward used a lesson from art history to draw attention to the city’s real estate unaffordability crisis and increasing gentrification. For her, the situation was challenging, rapidly changing, and something people who live in the city are tangibly feeling.

“I decided to erect a flag onsite as a marker to draw attention to the latent space – signalling that ‘something is coming soon, but nobody really knows what’ – but you can sort of guess what that would be, and you’d be right: a condo,” she says.

Commemorating the working class

Ward’s flag depicts an illustration of an unbuilt monument by German artist Albrecht Dürer, who offered several suggestions on how to commemorate a victory “vanquishing rebellious peasants.” Dürer was referring to the German Peasant’s War, which took place in the Holy Roman Empire in 1524. In response to increasing taxation, eroding autonomy and gradual privatization of communal lands, feudal peasant serfs revolted against the nobles who had held the estate lands the serfs worked and thrived on. However, the serfs were no match against a professional army and the war ended in 1525.

“In Dürer’s time, the tradition of making monuments to battles, was to take the implements of the losing parties, stacking them up vertically, and then having the figure of the losing party on top,” says Ward.

Thus, some of Dürer suggestions included laying “in the four corners of the stone block place four baskets, filled with butter, eggs, onions, and herbs, or whatever you like,” some suggestions of which Ward has incorporated in her interpretation of Dürer’s monument. From an art historian’s point of view, Ward says Dürer’s monument is one of the first artworks whose intentions are ambiguous.

“Is Dürer’s monument marking [the peasant war] celebrating the victory over the peasants, or is it shaming the victors?” Ward asks.

Contemporary significance

Ward saw parallels between the Holy Roman peasant serfs and the contemporary real estate situation here in Vancouver. Areas of Mount Pleasant are undergoing rapid redevelopment where land is being reclaimed by developers in order to build multi-story properties. Ward’s project sits on a site of a former grocery store, which burned down in 2012. The site is slated to be redeveloped into a multi-storey property later this year. Ward obtained permission to use the land to exhibit her project until August.

“In the course of research, I came across [Dürer’s monument] and I thought it was perfect, since it re-raises the issues of the privatization of space, access to land, modes of sustenance and means of survival,” she says.

Ward likes using her art to spark conversations, thinking through how to create better systems and societies and the role of imagination in helping us get to someplace better. At the very least, she hopes the project, in a creative way, gets people to consider how the historical issues can illuminate contemporary worker struggles.

“I thought [the causes and results of the historical event] is a very apt analogy of what’s happening here,” Ward says.

Instead of a peasant war, Ward will host a barbeque and discussion at Dude Chilling Park on June 9 in order to foster and continue dialogue.

“I’m not in a position of power, but what can I do? I can see if I can put something up in a public space that has a message that is provocative and can potentially inspire new ideas – that’s what I can do,” she says.

To learn more about Ward’s and the Western Front Urgent Imagination’s projects, visit www.urgentimagination.front.bc.ca