For and From Whom We Owe Our Strength
October Virtual Program
Presented in partnership with
Woodland Pattern Book Center
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Join us for a Zoom meeting to talk about the program 7:00 CDT on October 2nd.
Before
Cecilia Araneda, 3 mins 35 sec, 16 mm & HD
Synopsis:
With intricate hand-printed 16 mm footage, Before is a dark ode to the possibility and impossibility of love. It reflects on time, inner worlds and soft landings we find in desolate moments in life.
Artist Bio:
Chilean-Canadian filmmaker and curator came to Canada as a child as a refugee together with her family, after they escaped Chile’s right wing military dictatorship. She grew up in northern Manitoba, in Leaf Rapids and The Pas, and currently lives in Winnipeg. She holds a BFA (hons) from York University and an MFA from UBC, and is additionally a three-time alumna of the fabled Film Farm.
Araneda has completed 15 short films to-date, which have been presented at film festivals, artist run centres and art museums around the world, and that have been recognized with various awards and distinctions nationally and internationally. Among the festivals that have presented her work include Visions du Reél, Ann Arbor, Jihlava IDFF, Images and Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. Solo career surveys of her work have been presented in Ottawa (2010), Toronto (2017), Winnipeg (2018), and Buenos Aires (2018). She has been awarded art residencies by LIFT: The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto as the inaugural recipient of the Roberto Ariganello Prize (2017) and by Q21 in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier (2019), and has been the recipient of several national and international prizes for her art practice. She is currently in development with two feature length film projects.
Araneda is also an internationally recognized media art curator. In 2019, she became the first-ever curator from the prairies to be awarded the Joan Lowndes Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, for independent curatorial practice in visual and media arts. In 2017, Araneda was additionally the recipient of an international curatorial residency at the FICWALLMAPU International Indigenous Film Festival of the Mapuche Nation, funded in full by the Canada Council. In 2018, she returned to the festival a year later as a curator to present Caroline Monnet’s first artistic career survey, presented in October 2018 at the festival in Temuco and a week later in Santiago (Chile). Araneda has additionally curated multiple programs over nearly a decade for the WNDX Festival of Moving Image (an organization she co-founded with filmmaker Solomon Nagler).
More recently in June 2020, she served as commissioning curator of the !in.site; exhibition at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, featuring new digital artworks by emerging artists Dallas Flett-Wapash and Taylor McArthur. She is also leading the Winnipeg-based Mujer Artista project, connecting Latin women artists from the prairies with collective professional development, which recently held a project show at aceartinc. in January 2020.
From 2006 to 2017, Araneda served as Executive Director of the Winnipeg Film Group / Winnipeg Cinematheque, a storied organization within the Winnipeg arts milieu with a budget of $1M and a permanent staff base of 14, transforming it into a new era of financial stability, increased facility and technology capacity, and significantly increased diversity. From 2018 to 2020, Araneda took on a two year consulting scope with the Brandon-based Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, spearheading its Manitoba Digital Initiatives project to support media art development capacity in Manitoba outside of Winnipeg. From 2020 to 2023, Araneda will work with the Winnipeg-based Harbour Collective to develop a business plan for a new, decentralized national model media art production centre with programming and service delivery via digital mechanisms and regional partnerships.
Araneda is trilingual in (in order of dominance): English, Spanish and French. She has also more recently begun studying Anishinaabemowin (Southern Manitoba Ojibwe dialect). Similar to most Latin Americans, Araneda is of mixed European and Indigenous (Mapuche) ancestry.
The Man Passing By
Müge Yildiz, 4 min 55 sec, video
Synopsis:
The video, based on the reflection of economic problems on daily life, wants to play with the expression of turning the corner, which means getting rich in a short time. Where I film the people turning the corner to make the video is where John Smith shot The Girl Chewing Gum. During the shooting, this accidental new video is created with the intervention of a Turkish citizen living in London who came to us.
Artist Bio:
Müge Yildiz (born in 1985, Turkey). She graduated from Galatasaray University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Cinema in 2009 and has studied at Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle for one term with the Erasmus Programme. She is currently working towards her master’s degree at the Department of Philosophy of Galatasaray University. The artist produces experimental videos and films, employs a shooting method she calls “being ghost” and produces moving images based on everyday life observations in line with existential themes. She works with analogue films such as 8mm, super 8 and 35 mm, 16mm, digital videos, archive sound and footage. Some of the exhibitions she has participated in include: L’Expérimental{recherche/art}, Rencontres Traverse Vidéo, Toulouse (2019), Resource Utopia , Elgiz Museum, Istanbul (2018-2019); La Chute, Rem Art Space, Istanbul (2018); Autofocus 9, Torino (2017); Young Fresh Different VIII, Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul (2017); Art Speaks out, Till it’s gone, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2016); BYOB , Pera Museum (2015).
Understand Yourself
Kordae Jatafa Henry, 7 min 31 sec, video
Synopsis:
In a future where communication is primarily nonverbally, movement is the medium and the message. ‘Understand Yourself,’ a new music film by Theo Croker and Chronixx, from Croker’s latest album Star People Nation, creatively reworks ideas that groundbreaking African American science fiction author Octavia Butler first introduced in her novel ‘Patternmaster,’ the first book from Butler’s provocative Patternist series.
In this music film, the collaborative partnership between Croker and Chronixx provides the occasion by which viewers are transported to another world, another order of reality. Croker’s trumpet erupts without warning only to retreat into the background after providing listeners with soulfully infused, sonic instructions for living. With lyrics like “up you mighty people, which point towards a “United States of Africa,” Croker enlist early 20th century black nationalism, particularly the philosophies and opinions of Marcus Mosish Garvey, the Jamaican-born leader and founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), to conjure up a Pan-African vision of the future. However, if you’re not paying close attention, you run the risk of missing out on how Croker’s musical embrace of black nationalist ideals like unity and self-determination stretches and extends them in new directions, journeying beyond prescribed limitations to radically new experiences. Nowhere is this point made clearer than the visuals that accompany Croker’s new song.
Directed by Kordae Jatafa Henry, “Understand Yourself,” which is itself a reworking of a popular Garvey expression (“Educate Yourself”), is indebted to the life and work of celebrated author Octavia E. Butler. By moving creatively between Garvey and Butler, self-understanding becomes the subject and eventual pathway to freedom. With Henry at the helm, we find a raw constellation of bodies communicating telepathically through corporeal movements across vast and seemingly unfamiliar landscapes. Here, Butler’s ideas about shared collective identity and systems of control find a powerfully evocative visual compliment. This beautifully choreographed story expresses themes as vast and universal as self-discovery and sacrifice but it does so without compromising its specificity to the inner lives of black people.
If jazz is dead, it only temporarily died in order to “rise from its own ashes” and be born anew. For as Amiri Baraka reminds us, black music and the social conditions that structure our lives are interrelated. Which is to say, one can’t discuss black music without thinking about how the sounds and images that musicians like Croker and artist like Henry produce derive their power and potency through their relation to the lives of black people. This too, is another form of nonverbal communication. So in a strange way, Butler’s future is already present.
-Written by Darol Olu Kae
Artist Bio:
As a filmmaker, visual artist Kordae Jatafa Henry’s work is a form of storytelling that is a revival of 21st-century counter-cultures and human experiences.
Kordae is interested in expanding our understanding of futures by taking fragments of these worlds and examining the variety of human interactions. Through a collaborative process, his projects are able to amalgamate those fragments into new narratives and myths.
His most recent work explores the ontological themes of raw materials, mysticism, landscapes, movement performance, race, gender and emergent technologies through the power of ceremony and ritual. As a non-binary approach, Kordaeís work reconstructs past, present, and future narratives driven by pop-culture, and new sci-fiction.
His release of his 2019 film Earth Mother, Sky Father short film has led him to take the stage at the 2019 Design Indaba Conference, being a nominee for the shots 2020 ëNew Director of the Yearí, and exhibiting art house spaces in Mexico, South Africa, Europe and in the USA.
The ideas that infiltrate technology and culture is at the core of his practice, which stems from a multidisciplinary background of a dual Masterís of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from University of Pennsylvania School of Design and a Master of Arts from SCI-Arcís Fiction Entertainment post-graduate program.
Through live-action music films, installations, dance, game engine environments, and mythology, my work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, pop-culture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination.
Instagram: @jatafa
3 Seasons & Departing Tide
Lani Asuncion, 3 min 39 sec, video
Synopsis:
3 Seasons does not welcome the viewer. Instead, the viewer experiences the uncomfortable position of waiting and maintaining a space throughout the changing landscape around them. Time passes and the viewer must stand unwavering through the transitions of seasons. There is a gap, a missing fourth season: this absence signifies the laps of memory within American history; the missing moment of reconciliation and retribution.
The second video Departing Tide, the waves move away from the shore instead of towards it. This speaks to the difficulty of returning and remaining home that the native Pacific Islander and Asian diaspora continue to face due to gentrification, industrialization, and tourism. For example, the development of Hawaii’s agricultural and tourist economic model, imposed in large part by foreign interests, has demanded assimilation from Native Hawaiians in order to survive and maintain economic success.
The pineapple is a symbol and statement on the painful history that the United States has with the sovereign land of Hawai’i. It is also a symbol of colonization, foreign versus belonging. Hawai’i is also the birthplace of my father who grew up on a sugar plantation that harvested sugarcane and pineapples. The two-channel video 3 Seasons & Departing Tide speaks to the Asian Pacific Islander experience of navigating assimilation and displacement from home.
The person in the Pineapple Girl Series is isolated and separated as well as integrated as a part of the landscape that are both familiar and foreign simultaneously. They are a reflection of the multicultural background they possess and desire for belonging to place. In facing the tides that leave the shores of home, this series calls for a reckoning with the sense of danger and immediacy that comes with giving oneself over to the land, of being vulnerable to what new futures may come. By reconstructing narratives, a reclaiming of the Pacific Islander identity would allow for opposition against oppressive structures of power to be challenged and a empowered sense of self regained.
Artist Bio:
Asuncion earned her MFA in art with a concentration in video and sculpture from the University of Connecticut in 2011 and is currently a Studio Manager of the Media Arts Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her work has been screened in Another Athens Film Programme with SNEHTA shown at SUPERMARKET Independent Art Fair in Stockholm, Sweden with Interviewroom11. She is an artists-in-residence alumna of Caldera Arts Center, Elsewhere, Santa Fe Art Institute, Vermont Studio Center, Bilpin International Grounds for Creative Initiatives in New South Wales, Australia, and in 2019 made new work at Cerdeira in Lousã, Portugal. In 2016 she was a recipient of the Dame Joan Sutherland Fund grant from the American Australian Association, and Assets for Artists grant from MassMoCA. She participated in ILLUMINUS Boston 2017, and regularly performs live shows throughout the city. Her Human Garden Series was shown at the Boston Children's Museum Art Gallery and she hosted a series of workshops.
God’s Work
Kordae Jatafa Henry, 5 min 11 sec, video
Synopsis:
In my attempt to create a link to my own Jamaican - American - British diaspora I find this film as a gateway to fill in the gaps of what was long underseen.
GODS WORKS is a interstellar short film that pirates the internet - tethering directly to the notion that matter is always in a state of flux as an effort to remake itself. In a state of metamorphosis, we find a resurgence of pain, drama, joy, violence all in the movement. The film is a recontextualization of the way we see work and the way we feel when the body quantum leaps into a collapsed waveform.
Bruk up style migrated from Jamaica by way of Greg Adams and his DNA has infiltrated the NY street dance scene in the early 90's. It has birthed 30 years of form and movement across the unfathomable landscape of blackness.
It's hard to tell where the division ends between the fixated eyes and the pulsating satire of Gregís ability to own all your emotions at once. In the starkness of a gathering, he becomes the light, illuminating across the terrain of black bodies uplifting the black gaze in which he stands upon this black night.
Artist Bio:
As a filmmaker, visual artist Kordae Jatafa Henry’s work is a form of storytelling that is a revival of 21st-century counter-cultures and human experiences.
Kordae is interested in expanding our understanding of futures by taking fragments of these worlds and examining the variety of human interactions. Through a collaborative process, his projects are able to amalgamate those fragments into new narratives and myths.
His most recent work explores the ontological themes of raw materials, mysticism, landscapes, movement performance, race, gender and emergent technologies through the power of ceremony and ritual. As a non-binary approach, Kordaeís work reconstructs past, present, and future narratives driven by pop-culture, and new sci-fiction.
His release of his 2019 film Earth Mother, Sky Father short film has led him to take the stage at the 2019 Design Indaba Conference, being a nominee for the shots 2020 ëNew Director of the Yearí, and exhibiting art house spaces in Mexico, South Africa, Europe and in the USA.
The ideas that infiltrate technology and culture is at the core of his practice, which stems from a multidisciplinary background of a dual Masterís of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from University of Pennsylvania School of Design and a Master of Arts from SCI-Arcís Fiction Entertainment post-graduate program.
Through live-action music films, installations, dance, game engine environments, and mythology, my work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, pop-culture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination.
Instagram: @jatafa