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sometimes, some times
“sometimes, some times”:
An evening of sound and poetry in Finnish & English
Date: Thursday September 10, 2026
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Enabling Arts, 343 Railway St. Unit 104, Vancouver
Cost: FREE
Olli Aarni (born in Oulu, Finland in 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound, music, language, and literature. His work ranges from sound installations to artist’s books, and from sound poetry to ambient and noise music.
His work covers themes such as perception of time, the relation between knowledge and senses, and translating phenomena from auditory to visual and linguistic realms, and back. The conceptual side of his work is sometimes upfront, and sometimes hidden and embedded in the pieces.
Aarni has collaborated with scientists, musicians, visual artists and poets. Everything he does has to do with sound in some way or another, and whether it be in printed visualised form or verbally described.
A major part of Aarni’s work takes the form of audio recordings. He has released over 20 records on four continents with record labels such as Students of Decay, Flau, Dauw, Ultraääni, Mappa, Mondoj, and Superpang. He has performed live in numerous European countries and in Japan.
He has made solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions, including the Helsinki Biennial. He has made works for the Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE, radio art festivals, and poetry events.
Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, sound and visual artists. She is the author of three poetry books: sometimes, forest (Talonbooks, 2026), Trauma Head (Anvil Press, 2018) and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016) and editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Anvil Press, 2019) and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012). Elee codirects the Whole Cloth reading series at University of British Columbia’s Green College with Dr. Bronwen Tate for which an author reads an entire collection. She also founded and administers the Warland Award celebrating hybrid forms of literature. In the last few years Elee has presented work and collaborated in the Nordic countries including Finland. Elee is the seventh poet laureate of Vancouver and her legacy project Here, Hearing is a community, sound-based project.
Karis Shearer is a 4th-generation Finnish-Canadian and scholar of literary audio, poetry, and print culture in Canada. She has published extensively on women’s labour in literary communities and, together with Deanna Fong, is the co-editor of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Finnish-Canadian writer Gladys Hindmarch. For 8 years she has been the lead UBCO researcher on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb Project and has co-authored The Data Primer with Marjorie Mitchell, Felicity Tayler, et al. With Emily Christina Murphy, she has co-authored numerous articles on digital humanities labs and co-edited the most recent issue of Scholarly Editing.