Postcards for a better budget: reimagining the cut
Has the Community Been Fed? is a workshop series centered on hospitality as a mode of public engagement between artists and their communities. Throughout the month of December, artists will host film screenings, workshops, and artist talks that traverse diverse points of research and interest, which will culminate with food and conversation. The aim of this workshop series is to engage the public through events while opening channels for exchange through food, outside the mediated boundaries of artist and public.
Has the Community Been Fed? is presented by Noor Bhangu, an emerging curator and scholar based between Winnipeg, Treaty 1 and Toronto/Tkaronto, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. Bhangu was the curator-in-residence at Latitude 53 from July-September 2019, and will return to curate an exhibition in early 2020.
Release of the Alberta government’s recent austerity budget has raised a lot of concern, anger and frustration among artists within Edmonton who are left wondering how to support one another and take action. Such times call for a re-centering of the role of the artist and a reminder of the myriad of the ways that artists contribute to shaping and facilitating community. I see the role of the artist as one who not only reflects the world back to us, but also helps us to imagine alternative ways forward—one who can help usher us into a world that is healthier, more caring and more just.
The evening will begin with a screening of short videos made by contemporary artists whose works remind us that formal investigations can also contribute to the recognition and dismantling of unjust systems. Following the short screening, a new mail-art project will be revealed, offering participants a chance to take part in the spreading of ideas as to how our province might look otherwise into the public sphere. Treats and desserts will be served as we think through these complex issues together in a space of comfort and care.
Featuring work by Christopher Harris and Lydia Moyer.
Screening Program
Christopher Harris (USA), still/here (excerpt from 60 minute film), 2000, 6.07 minutes
“still/here suffuses the blighted north side of St. Louis with a powerful melancholy, lingering on rubble- strewn lots, decrepit buildings, and empty streets, while footsteps and a continually ringing phone on the sound track suggest lives interrupted by the devastation. Holes in a movie theater marquee are powerfully evocative, but even more impressive is the film’s sprawling, almost chaotic form: its calculated incompleteness truly matches the subject, and Harris’s long takes imply--not without a hint of anger--that the ruins of his hometown are eternal.” --Fred Camper, Chicago Reader.
Lydia Moyer (USA), The Forcing (no. 1), 2015, 9.46 minutes
Part one of a series of collages that muddle the quiet detail of flora and fauna with the chaotic noise of mass upheaval, building tension through the offset of sound and image. Made in response to the turbulence of contemporary US American life, these works ask viewers to ride the waves of the capitalocene, placing climate change and the struggle for social justice side-by-side on the cosmic continuum.
Christopher Harris is a filmmaker whose films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of optically-printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African-American literature.
His international exhibitions include a career retrospective at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (Brazil), solo screenings at the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland), Images Festival (Toronto), Encontro de Cinema Negro (Rio de Janeiro) and a solo performance at the Essay Film Festival (London); additional exhibitions include solo screenings at the Brakhage Center 2 Symposium (Boulder, CO) and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL); a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH); two-person screenings at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, D.C.) and UnionDocs (Brooklyn); and group screenings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the VIENNALE-Vienna International Film Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, among many others.
Harris received a 2019-20 Artist Residency Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts and was a featured artist at the 2018 Flaherty Seminar, the recipient of a 2017 Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship and the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital grant. Interviews with Harris have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Film Quarterly and numerous other print and online journals. Writing about his films has appeared in periodicals such as Cinema Scope Magazine and Millennium Film Journal, among others.
From Lydia Moyer: My work is a personal response to a sense of crisis in the world. It casts the individual amidst the collective, wrestling with the overwhelming social, political, and environmental concerns that are the shadow of capitalism. I engage with these concerns alternately by conflating one with another, speaking from the past or future in order to address the present, and playing with the strange and uncanny amidst melancholy and grief. Moving equally and sometimes seamlessly between self- created and existing materials, I hope to evoke a felt-sense of unshielded – and unheroic – awareness through image, sound, and text. [www.goodfornow.net]
Christina Battle (Edmonton, Canada) has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently working toward a PhD in Art & Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario. Her research and artistic work consider the parameters of disaster; looking to it as action, as more than mere event and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. Through this research she imagines how disaster could be utilized as a tactic for social change and as a tool for reimagining how dominant systems might radically shift. She is a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and collaborates with Serena Lee as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries, most recently at: Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver); Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Blackwood Gallery (Mississagua), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Untitled Art Society (Calgary), 8-11 (Toronto), Nuit Blanche Toronto, Galveston Artist Residency (Texas); Studio XX (Montreal), Le Centre des arts actuels Skol as part of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (Montreal), Thames Art Gallery (Chatham, ON), Casa Maauad (Mexico City); and SOMArts (San Francisco). [www.cbattle.com]