This year’s Flaherty Seminar was programmed by Jon Davies and Steve Reinke; both have worked closely with Vtape as curators, artists, and friends!
We’d like to highlight the Vtape artists whose works screened in the seminar. To preview any of the works by these artists please email info@vtape.org for preview access!
Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) was a visual artist who primarily worked in film and video. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with retrospectives at MoMA in New York, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival, and Kunsthalle Oslo. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by the Feminist Press, CUNY.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 1:
Multiple Orgasm Barbara Hammer, 6 min, 1976, USA
Sync Touch Barbara Hammer, 10 min, 1981, USA
See Barbara Hammer’s CATALOGUE HERE
Emily Vey Duke is an experimental moving image and object maker from Nova Scotia. In 2016, her ten-year drawing and writing collaboration with Shary Boyle was made into an award-winning book called The Illuminations Project. Cooper Battersby is an experimental moving image and object maker from Canada. He has collaborated with Emily Vey Duke for over two decades. Their work has shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival among many others.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 1:
Curious About Existence Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, 11 min, 2003, Canada/USA
Program 7:
Bad Ideas for Paradise Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, 20 min, 2001, Canada/USA
Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, 14 min, 2006, Canada/USA
Lesser Apes Cooper Battersby & Emily Vey Duke, 13 min, 2011, Canada/USA
The Infernal Grove Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, 38 min, 2021-23, Canada/USA
See Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby’s CATALOGUE HERE
Theo Jean Cuthand grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He makes films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, gender, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally. His work has exhibited at the MoMA in NYC, the National Gallery in Ottawa, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He completed his BFA in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and his MFA in Media Production at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2015. He is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 2:
Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory Theo Jean Cuthand, 3 min, 1995, Canada
Untouchable Theo Jean Cuthand, 4 min, 1998, Canada
Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement Theo Jean Cuthand, 6 min, 1999, Canada
Anhedonia Theo Jean Cuthand, 10 min, 1999, Canada
You Are a Lesbian Vampire Theo Jean Cuthand, 3 min, 2008, Canada
Program 13
Medicine Bundle Theo Jean Cuthand, 10 min, 2020, Canada
Extractions Theo Jean Cuthand, 15 min, 2019, Canada
See Theo J. Cuthand’s CATALOGUE HERE
Sharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her practice engages with translation, history, and sound to uncover sensory and fractured ways of understanding the relationship between the self and the social in transnational contexts. Her works examine the role of colonialism, globalization, culture, and desire through poetics, abstraction and collaboration by working with artists, musicians, and writers to animate historical, political, legal, and popculture materials. Her most frequent collaborator is Alexis Mitchell (since 2009). In addition to her art practice, Sharlene works in the arts sector, including artist-run organizations and collectives in Canada, and with artists locally and internationally.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 5:
The Wind Sleeps Standing Up Sharlene Bamboat, 12 min, 2017, Canada/Pakistan
If From Every Tongue It Drips Sharlene Bamboat, 68 min, 2021, Canada/Sri Lanka/UK
Program 13:
Both, Instrument & Sound Sharlene Bamboat, 30 min, 2023, Canada
Bugs and Beasts Before the Law Bamboat Mitchell, 33 min, 2019
See Sharlene Bamboat’s CATALOGUE HERE
Alexis Kyle Mitchell is an artist and scholar based between New York and Glasgow. She often works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat as Bamboat | Mitchell. Mitchell completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Toronto where she held a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and currently holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Disability Studies at New York University under the supervision of Dr. Faye Ginsburg. She was artist-in-residence at Cove Park (2021), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017) and at the MacDowell Colony (2018), and is in production on her first feature-film, The Treasury of Human Inheritance.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 13:
Bugs and Beasts Before the Law Bamboat Mitchell, 33 min, 2019
See Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s CATALOGUE HERE
John Greyson (b. 1960) is a video/film artist based in Toronto. Since 1984, his many features, shorts and transmedia works have explored such queer activist issues as police violence, prison, AIDS activism, solidarity, homo-nationalism and apartheid (both South African and Israeli). His feature films include Fig Trees (2009), Lilies (1996), Zero Patience (1993), and Urinal (1989), and they have received numerous awards from festivals around the world. He is currently an Associate Professor in York University’s Cinema & Media Arts department, and is co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian & Gay Film & Video. His oeuvre is the subject of the critical anthology The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 15:
International Dawn Chorus Day John Greyson, 15 min, 2021, Canada
See John Greyson’s CATALOGUE HERE
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose genre-bending gender-hacking practices challenge existing operating mechanisms. She builds social interface with transgressive plots, constructs networked installation in participatory impromptu mode, and drafts sci-fi narratives in film scenario and artwork imagination. She is a net art pioneer: Brandon (1998–99) was the first web art commissioned and collected by New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her feature-length films Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000,) and FLUIDØ (2017) — respectively termed eco-cybernoia, sci-fi cyberpunk, and sci-fi cypherpunk — seek to define a genre of sci-fi new queer cinema. Cheang represented Taiwan with a mixed media installation, 3x3x6, at the Venice Biennale in 2019. She is releasing her fourth feature film, UKI, a sci-fi Viral Alt-Reality cinema in 2023.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 6:
3x3x6 10 cases 10 films Shu Lea Cheang, 100 min, 2019, Taiwan/Germany
See Shu Lea Cheang’s CATALOGUE HERE
Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his monologue-based video essays. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), mumok (Vienna), MACBA (Barcelona), National Gallery (Ottawa) and the Julia Stoschek Collection.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
When We Were Monsters Steve Reinke & James Richards, 20 min, 2020, USA/Germany
See Steve Reinke’s CATALOGUE HERE
Paul Wong (b. 1954) is an award-winning Vancouver-based artist and curator known for pioneering early visual and media art in Canada, founding several artist-run groups, leading public arts policy, and organizing events, festivals, conferences, and public interventions since the 1970s. Capturing the everyday, he uses video as mirror and probe, both to discover his own identity and to reflect the world back onto itself. Wong picked up a Portapak video camera in the ’70s as a renegade against the world around him and has become one of Canada’s most renowned multimedia artists, known for his fierce engagement with issues of race, sex, and death.
Works Screened at this year’s seminar:
Program 7:
60 Unit: Bruise Paul Wong, 5 min, 1976, Canada
Perfect Day Paul Wong, 8 min, 2007, Canada
See Paul Wong’s CATALOGUE HERE