OPENING AND CLOSING NIGHT
Kicking off the festival at the Royal Cinema on April 10 @ 7 PM, is an intimate and epic film by the Indian collective CAMP (artists in attendance). From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf was shot over four years with a variety of high definition and mobile phone cameras, providing a remarkable window into the usually invisible world of merchant seamen who traverse the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Having screened at Experimenta Festival, FID Marseille and Documenta, we are thrilled to bring this incredible film to Toronto audiences for our opening night.
Closing the festival is Canadian filmmaker Brett Kashmere’s film From Deep, a feature-length experimental documentary that looks at basketball and its profound role in American life. Screening April 19 @ 9 PM at the AGO’s Jackman Hall, the film weaves together clips from movies, music videos, television, and video games to follow the evolution of basketball, and uses the game as a cinematic platform to look at broader issues of culture, race and class.
LIVE IMAGES
LIVE IMAGES embraces and explores different traditions of performance with innovative works by Taku Unami, Evan Calder Williams and Lucy Raven.
This year we have invited New York artist, Andrew Lampert to mount an evening of live performances and culinary invention at the AGO's Frank restaurant on April 11. This dinner-length performance will feature a tasting menu specially prepared by AGO's Executive Chef, Jeff Dueck, as well as feature Toronto-based collaborator Michael Snow. This carefully curated event can be experienced anytime between 6 and 9 PM, and will be a tour for the taste buds as it opens up new ways of thinking about art and taste. Admission is included with the purchase of food and drink, either with a prix fixe menu through advance reservations or à la carte without reservations on a first come first served basis. Reservations can be made through www.ago.net/frank or by calling 416 979 6688.
ON SCREEN
This year’s ON SCREEN program brings together 100+ local and international filmmakers from 20+ countries in a series of feature length works and Images’ trademark curated shorts series. We are delighted to inhabit the AGO’s Jackman Hall as our main screening venue once again this year. Join us for talks with filmmakers and curators scheduled throughout the festival.
The 2014 Images Festival Canadian Spotlight falls on net-artist and self-proclaimed “amateur cultural critic”, Jennifer Chan. Ottawa-born Jennifer Chan’s unique aesthetic and imaginative sense of play critically explores increasingly pervasive digital platforms. Recipient of the Mississauga Art Award for Emerging Visual Talent, Jennifer Chan’s videos, writing and web-based projects have been exhibited around the world including Transmediale, Vox Populi and Trinity Square Video. The Images Festival is proud to screen a collection of her work as well as a series of videos curated by the artist herself, on April 19 @ 7 PM.
Winner of multiple awards at The Copenhagen Documentary Festival and The International Film Festival Marseille, Narimane Mari's hallucinatory and dream-like film Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans), takes a radical approach to the turbulent history of Algeria’s war of independence, through the playful and evocative lens of re-enactment. Screening April 14 @ 9 PM.
Duncan Campbell is known for his insightful films that visually explore historical moments and figures, all the while questioning the authority and intention in the image. It For Others is no exception, as Duncan Campbell uses the 1953 film Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die) as the source and artifact to pursue a meditation on life, death, consumption and the value of objects. Screening April 13 @ 8:30 PM, Campbell presents his new work along side the 1953 film Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die) by Chris Marker and the recently departed Alain Resnais.
ON SCREEN ignites with Images unique collection of curated shorts programs addressing a variety of themes from cosmic concerns to earthly endeavors. These carefully crafted programs bring together vanguard artists like Travis Schilling, Brigid McCaffrey, The Otolith Group, Fern Silva, Alexandra Gelis, Dane Komljen, Karen Yasinsky, Vipin Vijay, Lindsay McIntyre, Inhan Cho, Aykan Safoglu, Lauren Cook, Alee Peoples, Ben Coonley, Chance Taylor, Ben Thorp Brown, Jennifer Brady, Manon de Boer, Jesse McLean, Derorah Stratman and many more.
Special guest curator Tirdad Zolghadr brings together five films that reflect on the theme of entrapment in Two Hours Two Minutes screening April 16 @ 8:30 PM. Join Tirdad Zolghadr on April 15 @ 7 PM at the Harbourfront Centre for an insightful lecture discussing labour relations and curatorial accountability in the biennial setting.
Double Nature brings together an array of international student artists in a program where the natural and the artificial exude a mystical and often forceful presence. Curated by Faraz Anoushahpour (OCAD University), Colton Bates (University of Toronto), Katrina Orlowski (York University), screening on April 14 @ 6:30 PM.
Every year Images showcases Toronto’s talent in our local program. Curator Johnston Ngo brings local filmmakers Byron Chan, Heather Trawick, John Kneller, Nathan Saliwonchyk, Chris Kennedy, Christine Lucy Latimer, Nicholas Pye, Terra Long, Deirdre Logue, John Creson and Adam Rosen in A collection of drops screening April 11 @9 PM.
OFF SCREEN
Out of the cinema and into the galleries! Our OFF SCREEN program presents media-based installations by Canadian and international artists at local galleries, artist-run centres and public locations including Mercer Union, Paul Petro Contemporary, Trinity Square Video and many more. Opening receptions, walking tours and artist talks are scheduled throughout the festival.
Monitor Reruns, curated by Shai Heredia (Director, Experimenta India, Bangalore), brings together five Canadian artists at A Space Gallery, whose works reflect the last decade of SAVAC’s annual Monitor program, engaging with themes ranging from personal narratives of trauma to accounts of colonial history, migration and queerness. Shai Heredia will also be in conversation with award-winning curator from the Art Gallery of Windsor, Srimoyee Mitra, discussing Monitor Reruns, and the politics, histories and identities that continue to shape the South Asian diaspora and subcontinent. April 11 @ 3 PM.
This year, a special exhibition at Gallery TPW will excavate Pad.ma - Public Access Digital Media Archive, an online film archive containing more than 1200 hours of footage from India, all of which is searchable, viewable and free to use. The Images Festival has invited CAMP as well as Reena Katz, Jesal Kepadia & Brian McCarthy, Ashok Mathur and Naeem Mohaiemen to respond to Pad.ma, by generating writing, performances, lectures and edits from the materials in the archive, culminating in a live event on April 19 @ 2 PM.
Artist duo Bambitchell (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell) present Silent Citizen, an installation in The Chinatown Centre Mall which reflects on Canadian Immigration and the impossibility of creating a homogenized national subject, by inviting viewers to playfully participate in taking the Canadian Immigration English Language Test – in the performative style of karaoke!
Lucy Raven’s new film installation Curtains, is viewed with 3D glasses, shedding light on the incredibly labor-intensive process of post-production in Hollywood cinema. Complementing her exhibition at InterAccess, Lucy Raven will also be presenting a special piece in our LIVE IMAGES on April 13 @ 5PM titled On Location. This performance investigates the history and context of labour in Hollywood, from the Fordist animation factories of Fleischer and Disney to current trends of outsourcing visual effects work to China and India.
Color Opponent Process is the most recent result of Aura Satz’s ongoing investigations into analogue cinema and sound technology, specifically the Technicolor process co-developed by Herbert Kalmus. The centerpiece of the installation at Gallery 44 is A Doorway for Natalie Kalmus, an 8 minute video, which explores the interior of a 35mm Technicolor film printer, while simultaneously paying tribute to the wife of it’s inventor. The film is accompanied by 35mm colour coded filmstrips and a series of lightboxes displaying frame enlargements from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1916 film, Joan the Woman.
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc's visual essay Foreward to Guns for Banta at YYZ unearths the history of pioneering anti-colonialist filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, and her lost film Sambizanga. A continuation of his ongoing research-based practice into the independence movements in lusophone Africa, Abonnenc draws upon archival documents to revisit revolutionary moments and pay homage to a lost and little known film.
Maha Maamoun’s Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years is a snapshot of a population in a moment of upheaval. Set during the spring of 2011, this compelling video is entirely composed of images from YouTube that were shot by men and women as they broke into Egyptian State Security Buildings, and is on view at Vtape throughout the festival.
The six artists in Transcending Binaries, curated by Adrienne Crossman, question and queer the relationship between the physical and digital self. Complete with life-sized interactive avatars that allow you to create post-gender figures, to investigating the social landscape of cis-gendered advertising in North American shopping malls, the works in this powerful exhibition at Xpace Gallery, explore the confines of digital media and the complexities of race, sexuality and gender in a post-binary world.
DAYTIME HUB + NIGHTTIME LOUNGE
This year, the Images Festival inhabits Cinecycle, the iconic coach house behind 401 Richmond, as our post-screening lounge. Join us every night of the festival for drinks, food and dancing. During the day, visit our public Mediatheque and Images Festival Bookstore at Urbanspace Gallery in 401 Richmond.
Tickets for the festival are now available online: http://www.imagesfestival.com/store
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