Contemporary Calgary Presents Hummingbird Guided Meditation: A Cinematic Exploration of Time and Migration
Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen. Hummingbird Guided Meditation (still), 2024.
Contemporary Calgary Presents
Hummingbird Guided Meditation: A Cinematic Exploration of Time and Migration
Calgary, Alta., (March 5, 2025) – Contemporary Calgary is pleased to present Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen’s Hummingbird Guided Meditation, opening on Thursday, March 6, 2025, from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. and running until June 29, 2025. This moving image and sound installation immerses the viewer in Super8 footage and spatialized sound, inviting embodied contemplation. Crafted with a speculative imagining of a hummingbird’s perspective on the world, this work opens a space for self-reflection, inter-species empathy, and attunement to the unseen forces that connect all things. Media are invited to an exclusive opening reception on March 6 opening reception from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at Contemporary Calgary (701 11 Street SW). Interviews with artists Miruna Drăgan and Maggie Tiesenhausen are available upon request. Please reach out to Nikita@parkerpr.ca
Hummingbird Guided Meditation unfolds 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 migratory ellipse. Super8 footage, captured in an overgrown garden in Querétaro, Mexico, is slowed to embody the hummingbird’s experience of time and space, opening a channel for speculative empathic exchange between species. From a perspective attuned to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize, blossoming into blurred expanses.
The accompanying soundtrack is composed of field recordings made over several years along the hummingbird’s migratory path. Sources include the tolling of church bells, freight trains, friends laughing, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Departing from the conventions of field recording within New Age music and naturalism, the sound is haunted and ambiguous, rarely resolving. Manually looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the murky, fluttering electronics evoke a magnetic, 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 Super8 film, digitized 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 expanded iteration is now presented as an immersive installation with spatialized sound and a hummingbird narrator. The words of the hummingbird were written by Marianne Shaneen and voiced by Paulina Macías.
Please contact nikita@parkerpr.ca to receive images for the press, book interviews with spokespeople or for information. Learn more about the exhibition, here.