Paths/Futures
Online Screening curated by Mariana Muñoz Gomez
Still by Leah Decter
2011 | 3:51
still is part of an ongoing body of work that addresses the persistence of colonial structures in contemporary Canada through a critical white settler lens. These works confront facets of this overarching concern through a practice of performing interventions into the land/scape and tampering with iconic elements of Canadian visual culture. Integrating the residue of an off-camera performance within a quintessentially ‘Canadian’ landscape as a politically, culturally and historically mitigated representation, still speaks to the ways dominant nationalist mythologies work to conceal colonial realities and perpetuate the inequities of colonial logics.
Missed the online screening? Watch Still on VUCAVU.com now!
Sacred not sacred: pilgrimage by Shawn Olin Jordan
2014 | 4:00
Notions of externalized and internalized journeys, identity and place, and the mundane and the exotic are explored in a series of clips from an imagined nature documentary series. At question is our spiritual and psychological relationship with the land and how we project our unmet needs and desires onto it.
Missed the online screening? Watch Sacred not sacred: pilgrimage on VUCAVU.com now!
BOT I by Praba Pilar
2014 | 13:10
Performance artist Praba Pilar’s video version of her techno-obra performatica, BOT I. Samuel Beckett gave us “Not I,” Asimov gave us “I Robot,” and now, from the neo colonial world center of silicon nanobots of San Francisco, California, Pilar offers us BOT I. The body in the techno craze? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency? Biopiracy and indigeneity? Military Robotics? Trafficking of women over the internet? E-Waste? Autobiographical and contemporary, this interpretation of the delusions and illusions of the technocultural era delivers us Out, Into This World….
Missed the online screening? Watch BOT I on VUCAVU.com now!
Pasts/Futures notes from the Curator:
These video works bring up questions of possibilities for pasts and futures of a colonial, capitalist world.
In BOT I, a disembodied, feminized mouth becomes abstract, becomes part of the screen. Becomes a cyborg bursting with awareness, and painting a picture of a nearing apocalyptic world: hazardous materials, human trafficking, Christopher Columbus…STOP! Its programming informs this cyborg to become more “efficient,” but it resists.
Sacred not sacred: pilgrimage begins with a view of decontextualized landscape. Machines function among the frozen land, and forgotten remnants from an industrial world peek out through the snow. A meditative voice-over questions human relation to nature, the sublime, and the exotic. It asks, “what matters?”
As Sacred not sacred ends with themes of thawing and regeneration, Still opens with the hopeful sound of birds. But is it smoke that we’re looking at? Rushing water? A wider shot offers some context but a disappearing relic makes us question: was anyone ever there?