aluCine Latin Film+Media Arts Festival – Feelings: Contemporary Art Exhibition
aluCine Latin Film+Media Arts Festival
presents:
Feelings: Contemporary Art Exhibition
Opening Reception April 2, 6:00-8:00 PM
Beaver Hall Gallery
29 McCaul Street, Toronto, ON M5T 1V7
(The exhibition will be running until April 16th, 2015)
This exhibition proposes to examine the element of feeling and emotion in media art as a means
to disrupt the homogenous and immersive space of the mediatic and virtual realms. The artists in
the exhibition negotiate the dynamics between emotional affect, and its portrayal through the
sterility and distance of media art.
Historically, the subject of embodiment, or the transition of the human body from a physical to a
virtual space, has taken centre-stage to media artists' concerns. In Latin America and its
diaspora, media and performance artists have featured the body precisely due to its precarity
amidst geo-political and social violence. However, this exhibition attempts to move beyond the
discussion of embodiment to include the dimension of psychology and the spectrum of emotions
(such as anger, love, hate, resentment, admiration, and devotion) as a politicized state of being
that is activated through media. In the context of aluCine, and filmmaking as a genre, this
exhibition will also explore the formal tropes and stereotypes of the Latin-American dramatic
character.
The artists proposed for this exhibition include a selection of Latin-Canadian media artists,
including Sojin Chun (Ontario) alongside international well-known artists Gabriela Goder
(Argentina), Ximena Cúevas (Mexico), Nelly César Marín (Mexico), and video-performance
artist Christian Jankowski (Germany).
We have chosen a combination of emerging and established artists because their work points to
different appearances of feelings that play off of each other to draw out points of interest and
contradictions. These tensions destabilize stereotypes of the Latin-American dramatic character,
and use the medium to evoke and reveal an economy of emotion at play.
Friday, April 3, 2015
3:30PM – 4:30PM
Venue: Beaver Hall Gallery
Industry Event: Curators and Artists talk
Title: Curating and Creating in the Diaspora
Artists: Gabriela Golder, Ximena Cuevas Sojin Chun, Nelly César Marín, Christian Jankowski
and curators Alejandra Coates, Zaira Zarza. Modarated by Sinara Rozo.
The participating artists bring new and recent works to an ongoing and important conversation in
modern and contemporary art. Since Immanuel’s Kant “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,” art has
historically been associated with the purpose of evoking subjectivity and emotion. The type of
emotion and the purpose of that emotion is a fraught terrain for contemporary art making. This
exhibition will situate the discussion in the genre of media arts, as well as through perspectives of
artists from developing countries and the global south (particularly Latin America and its
diaspora).
1
aluCine Latin Film+Media Arts Festival – Feelings: Contemporary Art Exhibition
Feelings will be presented to the public, within a critical context, promoting independent LatinCanadian artists within a professional setting. In conclusion, our project Feelings aims to
increase awareness of media arts among diverse audiences and improve audience
understanding and provide access to independent media artworks by Latin-American artists.
CURATORS: Maria Alejandrina Coates and Sinara Rozo Perdomo
1.
Christian Janowski, Crying for the March of Humanity, 2012, one channel video
installation: http://vimeo.com/groups/151657/videos/53704483
2. Gabriela Goder, Dolor, 2010, six channel video installation: http://vimeo.com/10034637
3. Nelly César Marín, Mi Gusto Es, 2012, one channel video installation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPo6GIXVJlE&feature=youtu.be
4. Ximena Cuevas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8T82iWal1k
5. SoJin Chun
Artistas
Christian Jankowski
Jankowski works across video, installation, photography, and the mass media formats of
television and cinema. His practice is largely rooted in performance and evolves out of a
collaborative process. Bestowing creative responsibility onto unsuspecting participants, he
engages his collaborators as "co-authors" of his work as they perform everyday gestures. With
a subtle sense of humor pervading his work, Jankowski explores the boundaries between art and
commerce, challenging the notion of the transformative power of artistic creation as it seeps into
popular culture. Known for his critiques of contemporary art production, his work engages both
the social and the aesthetic.
Christian Jankowski gained international recognition for his workTelemistica, 48th Venice
Biennale in 1999. He has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including exhibitions
at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and The Kitchen in New York.
He was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and Performa 07.
Gabriela Golder
Visual artist, curator and professor of Video and New Technologies in Argentina and abroad. She
is the co-director of the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (BIM) and CONTINENTE, Research
Center in Audiovisual Arts, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, in Argentina. Since the
beginning of 2013, she is the programmer of the Experimental Video and Film Program of the
Modern Art Museum, in Buenos Aires.
She was artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada; the CICV, France; the
Kunsthochschule für Medien, Germany; Schloss Balmoral, Germany; Wexner Center for the Arts,
United States; UQAM, Montréal, Canada, Chambre Blanche, Québec, Canada, RBHA, Sao
Paulo, Brazil and Le 104, Paris, France.
2
aluCine Latin Film+Media Arts Festival – Feelings: Contemporary Art Exhibition
Ximena Cuevas
Ximena Cuevas is Mexico’s video artist extraordinaire: half magician, half mermaid, master of all
she surveys. Cuevas looks upon her beloved metropolis of Mexico City with an eye both
jaundiced and passionate. At the same time, she has turned her camera back on her own daily
life and charted the quotidian pleasures and crises found therein. Her camera is expressive and
inventive, her editing style jaunty and edgy, her musical taste unerring. Whether her subject is
lesbian romance or heterosexual machismo, you couldn’t ask for a better guide."
—B. Ruby
Rich, San Francisco 1998
Cuevas is obsessed with the micro movements of daily life, with the border between truth and
fiction, with the "impossibility" of reality. Her work relentlessly seeks out the layers of lies covering
the everyday representations of reality and systematically explores the fictions of national identity
and gender. It redefines the meaning of documentary. Her videos have been shown in
festivals such the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Berlin, and Montreal, and she was the
featured artist at "Video Viewpoints" in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been an
invited speaker at numerous events, including those sponsored by the Pacific Film Archive in
San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Guggenheim in New York,
and most recently at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Among the many grants she has received are
those from the FONCA (Mexican National Endowment for Culture and the Arts), the Eastman
Kodak Worldwide Independent Filmmaker Production Grant, and Rockefeller, MacArthur, and
Lampiada grants. She toured Dormimundo, a documentary about the discomfort of being, as the
guest artist of the Central New York Programmers Group fall tour of 2000.
Nelly César is a Mexican artist living between Mexico City, Puebla and Vancouver. She
explores misbehaviours, perversions and love through durational performance, sculpture,
drawing installation and art--‐writing. Her work has been shown in Mexico, Canada,
Argentina, Hungary, France and the U.S. and has been featured in the Museo de Mujeres
Artistas Mexicanas (MUMA) and Archiva: Masterpieces of Mexican Feminist Art. .
Completed MFA studies at The University of British Columbia and a Licenciatura en Artes
Plásticas from Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. Co--‐founder and creative director of
Pandeo: The multi--‐social venue for affective health, in Mx City.
Sojin Chun
soJin Chun is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, video and installation.
Chun’s experience living in the Korean diaspora in Bolivia and Canada influences her
work, which looks at the idiosyncratic moments of everyday life in its inconclusive and
contradictory nature. By creating works that are whimsical, soJin pokes fun of her own
personal location situated in the Canadian systematic art world that categorize her as a
female Asian artist and as an adopted member of the Latino arts community.
Through artist residencies in Serbia, Bolivia, Brazil and Taiwan, Chun has developed a
personal style of storytelling using humour to reveal complex social issues. Chun has
participated in video screening and exhibitions in Bolivia, Brazil, France, Sweden,
Germany, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan and the U.S. Her most recent accomplishments
have included a solo exhibition at Tragaluz Digital in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary
Islands, Spain as part of Fotonoviembre, a Biennale photography festival; a solo
exhibition at the Attic Gallery in the Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei, Taiwan.
3