Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, 4th floor, 401 Richmond St W
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 6:30 p.m.

Curated by Hailey Kobrin

Art Metropole and Vtape are pleased to present Your 15 Minutes Just Became Eternity, a screening taking place on Thursday May 28, 2026. This program re-screens video artworks by Genesis P-Orridge and h/er affiliates in full for the first time in over two decades. The program of five videos was originally curated by Scott Treleaven for a presentation at Lee’s Palace on November 23, 2000 that accompanied a performance by P-Orridge’s Thee Majesty. The selection of works are “cut-ups,” speaking to P-Orridge’s disgusting, glamorous and complex exploration of the limits of the human body and h/er spiritual investments in disrupting control through creative action. 

This screening is a free event that will take place at the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space at 401 Richmond Street W. As capacity is limited, we ask that you pre-register at this link.

Videos featured:

1. Coumdensation Mucus, 33:06, 1974, Genesis P-Orridge & COUM Transmissions.
2. Music for Starecase and Stocking Top, 33:21, 1974, Genesis P-Orridge & COUM Transmissions.
3. Pirates: William Burroughs in London, 15:00, 1982, dir. Antony Balch.
4. Catalan, Psychic TV, music video, 5:25, 1984, dir. Derek Jarman.
5. Process Is…, 8:21, 1994, Process Media Labs.

Content note: the videos in this program feature pornographic content and performances involving real and simulated violence. 

Your 15 Minutes Just Became Eternity is co-presented by Art Metropole and Vtape, with support from Hemispheric Encounters. This screening is presented in association with Art Metropole’s exhibition Correspondence by Artists: Genesis P-Orridge, on view from April 8–May 31, 2026.

Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985
Clive Robertson (Canada, 1985, 14:10)

To celebrate May Day, and to put the focus on the pressurized situation in the arts, Vtape will be featuring Clive Robertson’s Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985 as our May Video of the Month. This tape is a condensed document of the 1985 rally that took place in Toronto: the Independent Artists’ Union (IAU) responded to cultural funding cuts to the Canada Council and the CBC, which were handed down by the then newly elected Progressive Conservative Party, in particular Marcel Masse from the Department of Communications. The rally included a march through the streets by over 800 artists and cultural supporters and concluded with speeches and presentations at the St. Lawrence Centre. The IAU was active from 1984 to 1989 with 700 members at its peak, transforming artists’ living conditions through advocacy for a living wage.

With the arts under increasing pressure from funding cuts, censorship, right-wing cultural backlash, and techno-cultural fragmentation, we recognize that this is nothing new. We have faced these conditions before and by organizing and working together, have been able to carry on doing the critical and fundamental work of independent art-making.

If you are in Regina, you can still see works by Clive Robertson and other 2025 Governor Generals Award winners, on display at the Mackenzie Art Gallery until May 3rd!

Working as an artist, curator, critic and artist historian since 1972, Clive Robertson attended art colleges in Plymouth, Liverpool and Cardiff before receiving an MFA (Performance Art Studies) from the University of Reading (UK) in 1971, and a doctorate in Communication Studies, Concordia, 2006. As an emerging artist, curator and publisher he worked with Fluxus artists Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles while curating a number of defining Canadian and international performance and video festivals in the 1970s, and media arts exhibitions and events in the 1980s and 1990s. His performance, video and audio works have been seen and heard in North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan and Australia. THEN + THEN AGAIN: Practices Within An Artist-Run Culture, 1969-2006 was a national touring archival retrospective exhibition (2007-11) of his individual and collaborative art, curatorial and publishing projects. His work was also featured in the Canadian touring exhibition TRAFFIC: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.

Prior to teaching art history and cultural studies at Queen’s, for 30 years Clive worked as a media artist, theorist, practitioner and national policy spokesperson within the artist-run centre movement directing interdisciplinary production and display spaces in Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa. An exemplar of multi-format publishing, Clive is a founding editor/publisher of Voicespondence Audio Art Publishing, Arton’s Video Publishing and Centerfold/ FUSE magazines. His writings on art and culture have appeared in Art & Artists, artsCanada, Parachute, FILE, FUSE, La Mamelle, High Performance, Parallélogramme, C Magazine, Public, Inter, Akimbo and RACAR, with many book chapters published on performance, media arts, cultural politics and policy.

Image Credits: Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985 (1985) by Clive Robertson

The second in Vtape’s series of collaborations with e-flux Staff Picks came sooner than expected! This month e-flux features four works made by Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele during the artists’ Los Angeles sojourn in 1976-77: The Ballad of Dan Peoples (Lisa Steele, 1976), The Woman From Malibu (Colin Campbell, 1976), The Temperature in Lima (Colin Campbell, 1976), and The Scientist Tapes, part 1 (Lisa Steele, 1976-77).

When Steele and Campbell packed their lives into a Volkswagen bound from Toronto for Venice Beach, they saw themselves as “cultural anthropologists,” writes curator Jon Davies. Steele was then best known for her 1974 landmark work of feminist video art Birthday suit – with scars and defects, which, as per its title, revealed the naked artist’s scars, bumps, and bruises. Her self-portraiture as self-inquiry met its match in Campbell’s paradoxical “confessional” style, demonstrated in pieces like This is The Way I Really Am (1973), in which the artist’s nude body is shown in two halves, one shaved and oiled and the other rugged and masculine, as the artist repeats the title ad nauseum. Romantically as well as artistically entwined, in 1976 the two discovered—fittingly, in close proximity to Hollywood—a new role for fiction in their practice. “I never try to distinguish between acting and not acting,” Campbell wrote. “They are the same to me.” Steele’s and Campbell’s respective works in Los Angeles—they conceived of and wrote them separately, working together only at the production stage—again situate the video artist in front of the camera, but engage a new sense of irony and the uncanny, working the blurry boundaries of performance and personal identity with deadpan personas. Shown alongside others from this period in Davies’s 2021 exhibition “I Almost Ran Over Liza Minnell Today“: Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele in L.A., 1976-1977 at ONE Gallery in West Hollywood, these four titles are provocative deconstructions of self, gender, and sexuality. In May 1977, as Davies notes, their Canada Council for the Arts grant had run out, and they were on their way home invigorated with the promise of a new video art.

Image credits: The Scientist Tapes, Part 1, by Lisa Steele (home page); The Woman From Malibu, by Colin Campbell (above)

Friday, May 8
Doors 6:30 p.m., show starts at 7:00 p.m.
CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave., rear)
Admission $12 in advance, $15 at the door; get tickets here

Equal parts art project, history lesson, and whimsy, Celestial Queer: The Life, Work, and Wonder of James MacSwain offers a portrait of an artist who defied convention for a life lived on his own terms. Directors Eryn Foster and Sue Johnson spent a decade checking in with the witty, erudite MacSwain as he moved about his life in north end Halifax, returned to his tiny rural hometown of Amherst, Nova Scotia—where he grew up, unable to pass for straight, in the 1950s—and discussed his lifelong, wildly inventive art practice. The playful, queer work is cut out, glued together, and sung into intricate collages, analogue films combining handmade animation with documentary, and provocative exhibitions. Johnson and Foster, who knew MacSwain for decades until his death in 2025, combine myriad formats in the production (including 16mm, Super-8, and digital video) for an intimate patchwork celebration reflective of their subject’s own body of work. Celestial Queer now stands as an elegy for a man who was defiantly original, internationally renowned, and an icon of artistic integrity. James MacSwain lived how he wanted—unabashed, uncompromising, and unforgettable.

Co-presented with Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre & Inside Out

Canadian tour supported by the Canada Council for the Arts & Arts Nova Scotia