Filtering by: Hummingbird Guided Meditation
Contemporary Kids: Hummingbirds, Homes, and Journeys
Mar
23
to Mar 30
Contemporary Kids, Events

Contemporary Kids: Hummingbirds, Homes, and Journeys

  • Contemporary Calgary (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS
 

Contemporary Kids: Hummingbirds, Homes, and Journeys

March 23 + 30

1-2:30 PM or 3-4:30 PM
Workshop

Join us for a fun kids workshop inspired by Hummingbird Guided Meditation by Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen. Through hands-on activities, children will bring their imaginations to life by creating their own papier-mâché nests. They’ll explore the incredible migration journey of hummingbirds between Mexico and Canada—discovering what they see, experience, and how they carry their stories.

Our free onsite Contemporary Kids programs invite children to learn about modern and contemporary art through unique and engaging art activities.

For children ages 5-12. Maximum group of 30 children, with one guardian per child. Questions? Please visit our FAQ page.

Contemporary Calgary Educational Programs are often photographed. This photography includes the participants, parents or guardians and their creations. If you wish to not be photographed, please let Contemporary Calgary education staff know upon arrival and they will assist you.

The same workshop is offered in four sessions for your convenience: two sessions on Sunday, March 23 and two sessions on Sunday, March 30. Choose one session that suits your schedule best.

Sunday, March 23
1:00-2:30 PM

Sunday, March 23
3:00-4:30 PM

Sunday, March 30
1:00-2:30 PM

Sunday, March 30
3:00-4:30 PM

About our TD Educational Facilitators

Poppy Ghasemi (she/her)

Poppy holds a bachelor's degree in Museum Studies and a master's in Anthropology. The awards she received from the University of Manitoba supported her research on child neglect. She has over four years of hands-on experience working with children and youth in museums and schools in Iran, Turkey, and Canada. Before joining Contemporary Calgary, she was a program educator at the Manitoba Children's Museum. Poppy primarily focuses on activating children's critical and creative thinking skills while delivering programs in English, French, Farsi, and Turkish. She enjoys cooking and walking with her husky along the Bow River during her leisure time.

Dandan Gu (she/her)

Dandan Gu graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts with a Bachelor's degree in Visual Communication Design. Prior to that, she obtained her first bachelor's degree in Marketing from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, China. Dandan has worked as a graphic designer for various companies and creative projects. Currently, she passionately serves as an educational assistant for art-making programs within the community, sharing her creative expertise with young learners. In her free time, Dandan enjoys practicing ink art, Chinese calligraphy, and illustrating cats and people around her.

Supported by

 

Supported by

 
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Artist talk: Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen
Mar
19
5:00 PM17:00
Events

Artist talk: Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen

 

Artist Talk: Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen

March 19
Heather Edwards Theatre | 5-6:30 PM

Join us for a talk with Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen, programmed in conjunction with their immersive moving image and sound work Hummingbird Guided Meditation, on view at Contemporary Calgary until June 29, 2025. Their audience-prompted conversation will focus on the evolution of this work and the individual and collective experiences that informed their collaborative process.

About the Artists

Miruna Drăgan (she/her) lives alongside Akokiniskway (the Rosebud River) and teaches in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 territory. With an intuitive approach, her work responds to observed synchronicities through a broad range of methods and materials, toward a subjective reimagining of archetypal myths and landscapes. Drăgan’s works come through in dreams or visions, reflecting themes of dispersion and transcendence, both as individual pieces and collectively within immersive environments, while offering themselves as new tools for divination or metaphysics. Recent exhibition venues include Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto (2023), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and Museo Regional de Querétaro (2022), Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2021), and Living Art Museum in Reykjavík (2019). Drăgan’s work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development, and the Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts).

Maggie Tiesenhausen (they/them) is a northwest Albertan settler music producer and artist. Their auditory works present insurgent, speculative imaginaries, and rural cinema-verité in a complex balance. The sometimes-disparate elements in interplay—found sound, field recordings, barely-audible confessions, amplified noise floor, accidental recordings, amateur performance—bring clouded internal sites into view. Often emotionally charged, atmospheric, and unresolved, these aural worlds summon a cinematic visuality. Tiesenhausen lives in Treaty 8 territory, in the unincorporated hamlet of Demmitt, Alberta. They also share a collaborative singing practice with artist and musician Jen Reimer called Tunnel.

 
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Exhibition Opening | Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen: Hummingbird Guided Meditation
Mar
6
5:00 PM17:00
Events

Exhibition Opening | Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen: Hummingbird Guided Meditation

 

Exhibition Opening
Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen: Hummingbird Guided Meditation

March 6
5:00-9:00 PM

Join us for the opening of Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen: Hummingbird Guided Meditation on Thursday, March 6, from 5–9 PM.

Hummingbird Guided Meditation immerses the viewer in moving image and spatialized sound, inviting embodied contemplation. Crafted with a speculative imagining of a hummingbird’s perspective of the world, this mesmeric installation opens a space for self-reflection, inter-species empathy, and attunement to the unseen forces that connect all things.

  • Doors
    5:00 PM

  • Remarks
    7:00 PM | Atrium

  • Galleries Close
    9:00 PM

FREE to the public. No registration is required.

This exhibition opening is presented in collaboration with FREE First Thursday.

Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen
Hummingbird Guided Meditation

March 6—June 29, 2025

Hummingbird Guided Meditation is a cinematic installation presented as a series of meditations on life from the perspective of a hummingbird. The film’s seven scenes correlate to moments along the hummingbird’s yearly migratory ellipse. Super8 footage captured in an overgrown garden in Querétaro, Mexico and slowed to embody the hummingbird’s experience of time and space, opens a channel for speculative empathic exchange between species. From a perspective attenuated to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize and blossom into blurred expanses.

Hummingbird Guided Meditation’s accompanying soundtrack is composed from field recordings on cassette tape captured over years and along the hummingbird's migratory path. Sources include the tolling of church bells, friends laughing, freight trains, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Departing from the entanglements of field recording with New Age music and hobby naturalism, the sound is haunted and ambiguous, rarely resolving. Manually looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the murky, fluttering electronics evoke a magnetic and instinctual world.

Engaging with its namesake methodology, Hummingbird Guided Meditation both creates and problematizes an interspecies imaginary, implicating us through its bejewelled and intoxicating veil.

The digitized Super8 film by Miruna Drăgan was previously exhibited on a small monitor without sound at Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2021 and as a single-channel projection with sound by Maggie Tiesenhausen at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro in Mexico in 2022. 

This iteration expands into a multi-channel projected installation with spatialized sound and a hummingbird narrator. The words of the hummingbird were written by Marianne Shaneen and voiced by Paulina Macías.

About the Artists

Miruna Drăgan
(she/her)

Miruna Drăgan lives alongside Akokiniskway (the Rosebud River) and teaches in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 territory. With an intuitive approach, her work responds to observed synchronicities through a broad range of methods and materials, toward a subjective reimagining of archetypal myths and landscapes. Drăgan’s works come through in dreams or visions, reflecting themes of dispersion and transcendence, both as individual pieces and collectively within immersive environments, while offering themselves as new tools for divination or metaphysics. Recent exhibition venues include Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto (2023), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and Museo Regional de Querétaro (2022), Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2021), and Living Art Museum in Reykjavík (2019). Drăgan’s work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development, and the Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts). 

Maggie Tiesenhausen
(they/them)

Maggie Tiesenhausen is a northwest Albertan settler music producer and artist. Their auditory works present insurgent, speculative imaginaries, and rural cinema-verité in a complex balance. The sometimes-disparate elements in interplay—found sound, field recordings, barely-audible confessions, amplified noise floor, accidental recordings, amateur performance—bring clouded internal sites into view. Often emotionally charged, atmospheric, and unresolved, these aural worlds summon a cinematic visuality. Tiesenhausen lives in Treaty 8 territory, in the unincorporated hamlet of Demmitt, Alberta. They also share a collaborative singing practice with artist and musician Jen Reimer called Tunnel.

 
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Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen: Hummingbird Guided Meditation
Mar
6
to Jun 29
Exhibitions

Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen: Hummingbird Guided Meditation

  • Contemporary Calgary (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS
 

Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen
Hummingbird Guided Meditation

March 6—June 29, 2025

Hummingbird Guided Meditation is a cinematic installation presented as a series of meditations on life from the perspective of a hummingbird. The film’s seven scenes correlate to moments along the hummingbird’s yearly migratory ellipse. Super8 footage captured in an overgrown garden in Querétaro, Mexico and slowed to embody the hummingbird’s experience of time and space, opens a channel for speculative empathic exchange between species. From a perspective attenuated to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize and blossom into blurred expanses.

Hummingbird Guided Meditation’s accompanying soundtrack is composed from field recordings on cassette tape captured over years and along the hummingbird's migratory path. Sources include the tolling of church bells, friends laughing, freight trains, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Departing from the entanglements of field recording with New Age music and hobby naturalism, the sound is haunted and ambiguous, rarely resolving. Manually looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the murky, fluttering electronics evoke a magnetic and instinctual world.

Engaging with its namesake methodology, Hummingbird Guided Meditation both creates and problematizes an interspecies imaginary, implicating us through its bejewelled and intoxicating veil.

The digitized Super8 film by Miruna Drăgan was previously exhibited on a small monitor without sound at Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2021 and as a single-channel projection with sound by Maggie Tiesenhausen at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro in Mexico in 2022. 

This iteration expands into a multi-channel projected installation with spatialized sound and a hummingbird narrator. The words of the hummingbird were written by Marianne Shaneen and voiced by Paulina Macías.

Upcoming Programs

Program Archive

About the Artists

Miruna Drăgan
(she/her)

Miruna Drăgan lives alongside Akokiniskway (the Rosebud River) and teaches in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 territory. With an intuitive approach, her work responds to observed synchronicities through a broad range of methods and materials, toward a subjective reimagining of archetypal myths and landscapes. Drăgan’s works come through in dreams or visions, reflecting themes of dispersion and transcendence, both as individual pieces and collectively within immersive environments, while offering themselves as new tools for divination or metaphysics. Recent exhibition venues include Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto (2023), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and Museo Regional de Querétaro (2022), Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2021), and Living Art Museum in Reykjavík (2019). Drăgan’s work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development, and the Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts). 

Maggie Tiesenhausen
(they/them)

Maggie Tiesenhausen is a northwest Albertan settler music producer and artist. Their auditory works present insurgent, speculative imaginaries, and rural cinema-verité in a complex balance. The sometimes-disparate elements in interplay—found sound, field recordings, barely-audible confessions, amplified noise floor, accidental recordings, amateur performance—bring clouded internal sites into view. Often emotionally charged, atmospheric, and unresolved, these aural worlds summon a cinematic visuality. Tiesenhausen lives in Treaty 8 territory, in the unincorporated hamlet of Demmitt, Alberta. They also share a collaborative singing practice with artist and musician Jen Reimer called Tunnel.

 
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