Photograph by Simon Hayter

As millions tuned in to watch Canada’s founding First Nation tribes being celebrated with spectacular production values in the Olympic opening ceremonies at B.C. Place, another audience was participating in a more gritty and audacious Aboriginal spectacle just blocks away at the far less grand Playwrights Theatre Centre on Granville Island. There, more than a hundred thronged to the Candahar Bar when doors opened at 7 p.m., eager to check out the opening night of one of the most buzzed-about art installations on Vancouver’s jam-packed 2010 Cultural Olympiad calendar: a pop-up replica of a Belfast public house that’s part performance space, part ongoing social experiment.

The fact the $5 admission covered a glass of wine, beer or whiskey helped draw the crowd. But when patrons approached the pub to wet their whistles, they found it packed with revellers. A burly bouncer blocked the entrance; only Aboriginal people were allowed inside, he told them. Everyone else had to wait until 8:30 to be served liquor; until then, there was water or pop. The only non-native revellers inside were the Belfast-born brothers Chris and Conor Roddy—the unscripted performance artists who also serve drinks—and Theo Sims, the puckish British-born artist who masterminded the Candahar, which is named after a street in Belfast. Sims wanted to construct a space that would dismantle the car-bombs-and-balaclavas stereotype of Northern Ireland, where he went to university. First staged in Calgary in 2006, the installation has since toured the country, with Vancouver its fifth and final stop. When it was exhibited at the 2007 Biennale de Montréal, Sims deflected the demand to provide bilingual barkeep, which became a heated subject of debate within the bar itself.

And so it was last Friday night, when patrons discovered they’d been part of “Indians Only,” a one-off production by Vancouver multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore, herself an Aboriginal Canadian. The idea, Belmore told Maclean’s, was to confront stereotypes about Indians drinking and to challenge presumed notions of privilege and prejudice.

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