Thursday, January 23rd 2025
Screening: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Vtape, Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
Lisa Steele’s The Gloria Tapes
This 4-part series, drawing from the aesthetics of the soap opera, was inspired by Lisa Steele’s experience working at a women’s shelter for many years. Combining the self-reflexive strategies of video art at the time with acute, documentary-like representations of female poverty and resilience, this uncanny work creates of the artist a double, revealing, to both artistic and feminist communities, that which is unfamiliar and strange. – Marusya Bociurkiw
A conversation with Lisa Steele will follow the screening moderated by Marusya Bociurkiw.
This is the Feminist Archive: Feminist Film and Video 1970s-1990s
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. 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.
Special thanks to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and Video Out/VIVO Media Arts Centre.
The Gloria Tapes, Lisa Steel, 1980
“Modelled on the soap opera format, this four-part series follows a young single mother who’s on welfare. It has been said that Gloria depicts a crisis of language, as she lacks the ability to speak on her own behalf. Thus she must rely on the words of others – those in positions of authority within her life: her father, her social worker, doctors, judges, etc. – to construct her circumstances into a form of communication that is about her and not for her. I think this is only part of Gloria, however, because in spite of the escalating catastrophes that befall her, Gloria reveals her ability to literally get hold of the language that has been oppressing her. First through repetition and retelling and finally by “breaking the silence” of her own painful childhood, she shows herself to be capable of surviving and changing.” – Lisa Steel
Lisa
Image Credit: The Gloria Tapes (Lisa Steel 1980)