Thursday, October 24, 2024
Doors open at 6:30 pm
Screening: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Vtape, Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
401 Richmond Street West, 4th floor
The four events in the series, screenings accompanied by conversations with the artists, recontextualize feminist film and video work as constitutive of archival futures; a future imperfect: what will be seen to have been. Too often, feminism is narrated and historicized as wholly outdated/transphobic/racist, invisibilizing BIPOC feminists who were leaders in the Canadian feminist movement and its art practice. Feminists themselves may attempt to disavow previous iterations of the movement. And yet, many examples of early feminist video engage, or invent avant-garde strategies, while also engaging in intersectional interrogations. The delimiting of the history of feminisms implicitly excludes much of the intersectional cultural work that was central to feminist projects. This is especially pertinent as American hegemony – the undoing of abortion rights, the war on trans bodies – continues to inform local and national contexts in Canada. The films and videos in the programs come from the last three decades of the 20th century when feminist political organizing was inextricable with women’s cultural production. This screening series emerges from the SSHRC-funded project “The Personal is Digital: Remediating and Digitizing Canada’s Intergenerational Feminist & Queer Media Heritage,” co-directed by Drs. Marusya Bociurkiw and Jonathon Petrychyn, with additional curation by Lexie Corbett and administration by Em Barton.
Program #2: Fantasy/Memory/Media
The Ancient Mariner and my Sister Sailboat, Rhonda Abrams, 1984, 12:28 min.
Dinner, Marnie Parrell, 1989, 4:00 min.
Shot over a Thanksgiving weekend, this film reflects the aimless, happy warmth of a late fall road trip. The layering of images through multiple exposure reinforces a where-are-we feeling.
Blood, Buseje Bailey, 1992, 6:00 min.
This tape deals with a personal, intense view of self – race and representation. A sense of personally touching the sexual self, of representing one’s sexuality. It is a reaction to the exploitation of Black Women’s sexuality in history and contemporary media imaging.
T.V. Love (a made for tv love story), Elizabeth Chitty, 3:40 min.
This work was created for an artists’ television project, Prime Time Video. It attempts to represent gender mutuality within a structure of references to television. It refers to a conventional narrative device, gives it a hyper-condensed treatment, uses special effects and plays with light.
Untitled – A Tape About Memory, Su Rynard, 1985, 4:00 min.
“I wanted to make a tape about memory, not just ‘about’ memory. I wanted to re-create the actual sensation of memory through texture, colour, mood and movement. I also wanted to examine time in relation to memory and visual experience. ” -Su Rynard
Domestic Bliss, Wendy Geller, 1987, 3:45 min.
A burst of claustrophobia, xenophobia, terror, anxiety, cunning and violence. Is this tape the re-creation of standard movie shots showing women enclosed within their “own” environment, or one woman’s drama played out in the terms lodged in her sub-conscious?
The Basement Girl, Midi Onodera, 2000, 11:40 min.
Abandoned by her lover, a young woman finds comfort and safety in her basement apartment. The Basement Girl breaks new cinematic territory by employing multiple formats from traditional 16mm film to toy cameras, including a modified Nintendo Game Boy digital camera and the Intel Mattel computer microscope.
Image credit: Blood, by Buseje Bailey (1992)