Thursday, March 6th, 2025 @7:00 pm
Location: Vtape, Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
Address: 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
Vidéographe and Vtape, in partnership with Le Labo, join forces to celebrate the richness and diversity of video art practices in the Montreal and Toronto scenes. This program brings together nine works from their respective collections, created by eleven emerging artists. Through this joint initiative, Vidéographe and Vtape aim to highlight and continue their longstanding collaboration.
PROGRAM (70 min)
Ko pyhare, para siempre, Fiorella Boucher, Laura Criollo-Carrillo, 2022, 5 min
Am I Human?, Gladys Lou, 2022, 1 min 37 s
Hommage à Rose Drummond, Antoine Amnotte-Dupuis, 2023, 12 min 23 s
Horse in Motion, Lillian Ross-Millard, 2022, 10 min 17 s
En attendant Lolo, Jules Ronfard, 2022, 8 min
The Propagation of Uncertainty, Emily DiCarlo, 2020, 5 min 50 s
Mindscapes, Valeryia Naboikina; Malte Leander, 2023, 8 min 40 s
Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, Samy Benammar, 2023, 3 min 48 s
Hoa, Tram Anh Nguyen, 2022, 14 min 24 s
SYNOPSES
Ko pyhare, para siempre, Fiorella Boucher, Laura Criollo-Carrillo, 2022, 5 min
Child of two worlds that do not speak to each other, a girl speaks to her mother and her grandmother. She travels through the dilated space of origins, impostures and wounds.
Am I Human?, Gladys Lou, 2022, 1 min 37 s
Am I Human? is a post-human exploration of data, artificial intelligence, and surveillance using video and sound. The glitch on screen disrupts communication and reflects my questioning of the challenges of being human within normative cultural standards.
Hommage à Rose Drummond, Antoine Amnotte-Dupuis, 2023, 12 min 23 s
Composer Jean Derome and his ensemble pay vibrant tribute to the prominent Quebec land art artist Rose Drummond through a collection of whimsical, ready-made songs brought to life by reassembled 16mm family archives and altered filmed performances.
Horse in Motion, Lillian Ross-Millard, 2022, 10 min 17 s
A figure walks through a digitally saturated landscape on a quest to find her grief, using old phone photos and videos as landmarks to help her navigate. This piece explores an amnesiac experience of loss, inspired by the artist’s fragmented experience of grief and melancholia during and around the pandemic.
En attendant Lolo, Jules Ronfard, 2022, 8 min
On a country road, a couple gone for a ride on a scooter find themselves immobilized after running out of gas. While waiting for their friend Lolo, a philosophical discussion ensues.
The Propagation of Uncertainty, Emily DiCarlo, 2020, 5 min 50 s
Emily DiCarlo’s three-channel video installation, The Propagation of Uncertainty, explores the friction between what she terms “the infrastructure of time and the intimacy of duration.” The work focuses on time frequency standards and how our accelerated, networked world relies on the foundation of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). While airports, stock markets, and telecommunications operate through precise temporal orchestration, UTC reigns as an authoritatively omnipresent force that, in reality, is far from absolute.
Mindscapes, Valeryia Naboikina; Malte Leander, 2023, 8 min 40 s
The notion of escapism refers to the tendency of individuals to retreat from the customary challenges of life into the comforting, yet deceptive, embrace of fantasy. Through a multidimensional exploration, this film maps a journey that encompasses the transformative phases of departure, immersion, and return.
Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, Samy Benammar, 2023, 3 min 48 s
In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the Oʻō of Kauai officially extinct. All that remains of this endemic bird from the eponymous Hawaiian island is a recording of its song by ornithologist David Boynton. Between the territories and the treetops, the artist is still hoping to find a trace of the extinct birds.
Hoa, Tram Anh Nguyen, 2022, 14 min 24 s
In Vietnamese, “hoa” means flower. It is also the first name of the filmmaker’s bà nội (paternal grandmother). Before developing memory disorders, his grandmother, Tuyết Hoa, wrote an autobiographical book about her life and its events. The book, translated from Vietnamese, is titled Memories of Tuyết Hoa and subtitled When My Country is Peaceful: Memoirs of a Saigon Female Student. She now reads this book every day in her home in Hanoi.
This project originated with members of Vtape’s board of directors, who were remembering a time when there were more frequent collaborations and exchanges between artist-run centres in Québec and Ontario. When it was incorporated in 1983, Vtape was partly modeled after Vidéographe, and the two organizations have worked together over the years as trusted colleagues dealing with similar issues in cultural policy, distribution, preservation, and digitization (including Vtape’s extensive restoration and digitization work for Vidéographe’s major DVD collection Istvan Kantor Anthologie Vidéo / Video Anthology). As organizations have become more locally focused, interprovincial collaborations have fallen off, and the recent pandemic disrupted a lot of ongoing communication and collaboration as we all struggled to adapt.
This screening brings together emerging artists from Montréal and Toronto in a single program that will be presented by both Vidéographe and Vtape. It is the result of an initiative intended to reopen these channels of communication and collaboration. We are curious to see what emerging artists in one another’s cities are doing, and how video art is changing in a post-pandemic, YouTube and TikTok world.
PARTNERS
Vtape
Incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1983, Vtape is one of Canada’s leading media arts distributors. Its distribution catalog includes more than 6,700 independent artworks by about 1,500 Canadian and international artists, spanning the years from 1969 to the present. In addition, Vtape provides public access to a large collection of research materials on video art and artists, and runs a restoration and digitization service for artists, museums, galleries, arts organizations, and other clients.
Vidéographe
Established in 1971 in Montréal, Vidéographe is an artist-run center dedicated to the research and the dissemination of moving image practices. This includes experimentation in video art, animation, digital arts, documentary, essay, fiction and dance video.
Le Labo
Founded in 2004 and incorporated in 2006 Le Labo, a center for francophone media arts in Toronto, supports and disseminates the work of artists in Toronto. Recognized for its strong community, Le Labo is a dynamic organization and catalyst for the practice of media arts in Toronto. As a member of the artistic community and the French-speaking community, the objectives of Le Labo are to support incubation, innovation, creation, and production in the media arts, as well as to promote collaboration and dissemination.
