Thursday, March 12th, 6:00 p.m.
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, 4th floor, 401 Richmond St. West

Join us for an exclusive exhibition walk-through with Jesse King, curator of the City of Toronto’s Market Gallery exhibition SKY & BONE (401 Richmond St. West, suite 128) at 5:30 p.m. After that, at 6:00 p.m., the Market Gallery and Vtape present a special screening of Robert’s Paintings (directed by Shelley Niro), an intimate and deeply moving portrait of acclaimed artist Robert Houle. Experience how Houle transforms memory into art, using his paintings as powerful sites of testimony, where childhood experiences, Canada’s colonial history, and the stories of others who walked similar paths come vividly into view. Attend this screening to witness art as memory, resistance, and remembrance.

FREE tickets are available here.

Image credit: Robert’s Paintings, by Shelley Niro (2011)

Presented By TD Bank Group, Toronto History Museums

For the month of March, Vtape is proud to present another work by an artist new to the Vtape catalogue: Mahlet Cuff.

why some people be mad at me sometimes (2024) is a single-channel experimental film that cites the mother of Dancehall, Sister Nancy, singing her song “Bam Bam“ in dialogue with Maya Angelou’s performance of the poem The Mask. A meditation on the misappropriation of Blackness within music, and how often Black folks are told to not criticize but to smile and be grateful. All while tracing the filmmaker’s relationship to Dancehall and Afro Caribbean culture through archival footage of themselves as a young person dancing at Folklorama. Folklorama has the intention to be a space for sharing diverse cultures, but is oftentimes a space of cultural consumption that erases the colonial history of the countries that are on display.

Mahlet Cuff (b.1998) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, filmmaker, film programmer, DJ, sound artist, community organizer and arts cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Treaty 1). Through an ethnographic-based practice, they are interested in themes of memory and erasure in order to make sense of the Black Queer diasporic communities they are a part of and engage with.

By using Black feminist citational praxis and interrogating their own personal familial archives, they create reimagined Black Queer Diasporic dance and music histories by visually and sonically collaging moving images and sound. Cuff’s work has been screened and exhibited in Winnipeg, Toronto, Windsor, New York, Paris and Brazil. Their video UTOPIA (an ode to the past, present and future) was shortlisted for the 2025 Fluxus Museum Prize for Experimental Video.

Image credit (home page): why some people be mad at me sometimes, by Mahlet Cuff (2024)