Conquering cancellation
How an uninvited series of Barbie and Ken photo tableaux led Vancouver artist Dina Goldstein to confront antisemitism
BY SAM MARGOLIS
“ It was a show about toys. There was no reason to remove me because of the context of the work. It was not a platform for a conversation about the war.” Dina Goldstein, a Canadian photographer born in Tel Aviv, is talking about how her work was pulled from Toy Story . The thematic group exhibition was scheduled from May 9 to June 29 at the Center of International Contemporary Art (CICA) in Vancouver—the city where her family moved in 1975, when she was five years old, and where she still lives today. Moving out on her own to the bohemian neighbourhood of Gastown inspired her to pursue a creative career. “In the art world it was accepted and required that you need to have your own voice,” Goldstein told The CJN in the wake of her being told her work wasn’t welcome by CICA in late April. “Now they are trying to shut down those voices for no reason.” The photographs kept from display are a series of tableaux from 2012 involving Barbie and Ken, over a decade before the blond characters were reborn as Hollywood icons. In the Dollhouse is a satire of situations in domestic life, sometimes with a risqué approach to social commentary. Musée d’Orsay in Paris requested to include one of its images in its Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera catalogue: “Haircut” was directly inspired by Khalo’s Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair . But in the heated discussions surrounding the removal of works by an Israeli-born artist at a Vancouver gallery, which she claimed was due to voicing support for her homeland, many were unaware
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