Fern Helfland and Costume Party

: One of the displays that Helfland said she hopes will start a dialogue features one of her family photos, taken in 1961, which shows her at a costume party when she was nine years old, dressed in blackface with pigtails with her brother wearing a feathered indigenous headdress and war paint, according to CBC. The full view of the display in the exhibition, which shows Helfand her siblings both in a group photograph, and in a photograph of just the three of them. "At that time people just did that stuff without thinking," said Helfland, who said she stumbled across the image recently and decided to use it for the exhibition. "Frankly I was quite taken back and rather shocked. Associate professor and artist Fern Helfland and her UBCO colleagues Tannis Nielsen and Samuel Roy-Bois are behind the exhibition What does it mean to be The Problem, which is at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art until Feb. 18. It was such a thoughtless thing to do. We're very much shaped by the media at the time." Helfland and her colleagues will talk at a public discussion on racism and privilege at the centre on Feb. 15. People just never gave those things a second thought back then." She said that photograph was taken at a costume party with other children from the Jewish community. "The parents of these kids were all mostly new immigrants themselves and some of them actually holocaust survivors, so this is children being assimilated into what it means to live in Toronto at the time. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.