Video, Web and Politics
Artists: Julieta Maria, and Public Studio Collective: Elle Flanders, Eshrat Erfanian, Tamira Sawatzky and Zev Farber.
Curated by Arlan Londoño.
September 30th to October 10th
Opening reception:
Thursday, September 30th
from 6 to 9 pm
Function 13 Gallery,
156 Augusta Avenue
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As a collective of artists from a Latin American cultural background, we are aware of the political implications of video. Through this medium, artists have commented on issues of inequality and on the rhetoric of power. During the last years, this addressing the political through video, or video-politics, has jumped from the TV or gallery screens into the new gadgets like laptops and the cell phone screens that are part of network connections, creating what we could call web-politics. In this exhibition we present both approaches to working with video. Julieta Maria performs for the camera, reflecting on her own context while referring to broader issues, while Public Studio Collective reflects on the use of video through web and its distribution and transmission of meaning.
In Exercises in Faith Julieta creates a series of video-recorded, personal performances where she explores the acts of inflicting and being subjected to violence. She begins her process with a self-exploration shaped by Colombia’s violence and dispute over the land. In Kino Pravda 3G, Public Studio Collective creates a six channel video installation where they explore the video transmission of protests on mobile devices, following the political movements around the world. Kino Pravda 3G is a reflection on the political and epistemological variations of video transmissions.
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Exercises in Faith
By Julieta Maria
Multiple channel video installation
Indian anthropologist Veena Das suggested that pain is an expression which longs to find a home in the body of another. The videos I am presenting reflect on violence and oppression using the body as the point of departure. The videos reflect on fragility, beauty and violence, questioning the limits of our relationship to one another and to the world, exploring affective responses and indifference, and the humanity and inhumanity that lurks at the core of all of us.
Julieta Maria is a Colombian, Toronto based new media artist with an MFA in Visual Arts from York University. She works with video and interactive installations, using technology to provide the audience with an intimate space for reflection. Julieta's recent work has been centered on video documentation of staged actions, exploring the experience of violence as an intrusion in the everyday relationship between the subject and the world.
Function 13 Gallery, 156 Augusta Avenue
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Kino Pravda 3G
By Public Studio Collective
6 channel video installation
The revolution is being mobilized. From the most recent G20 protests, to the Green movement in Iran and the Red Shirts in Thailand, 3G follows the recent political movements around the globe. While mainstream media’s repetitive slick images of riots create grand narratives, mobile phones in the hands of the protestors, allow for the narration of their own stories.
Vertov’s Kino Pravda (literally “film truth),” based on the belief that truth lay beneath the surface of what is seen and that fragments of reality edited together would present a deeper truth, provide the groundwork for today's Youtube universe. With simple, unadorned and functional images, Vertov’s transmitted his revolutionary world. In Kino Pravda 3G, Public Studio —a transient Toronto artist collective— assembles the detritus of mobile phone footage over the last year to illustrate the current state of affairs in protests from Tehran to Toronto.
Function 13 Gallery, 156 Augusta Avenue
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