Un/spoken Online Screening
Presented by Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Gallery 1C03 and Plug In ICA
Curated by Marie-Anne Redhead + Mariana Muñoz Gomez
Featuring Sebastien Aubin, Marissa Sean Cruz, LĂ©uli EshrÄghi, Sky Hopinka, Francisco Huichaqueo, and Karin Lee.
Online Discussion between curators and artists: November 9 at 7:00 pm CT
Introduced by Sovereign Intimacies curators Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith. Featuring Un/spoken curators Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead in conversation with Marissa Sean Cruz and LĂ©uli EshrÄghi.
Curated by Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead, Un/spoken is a video screening program presented by Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Gallery 1C03 and Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition, Sovereign Intimacies. Un/spoken weaves together work by Indigenous artists and racialized artists in diaspora from all over the world. It features works by Sebastien Aubin, Marissa Sean Cruz, LĂ©uli EshrÄghi, Sky Hopinka, Francisco Huichaqueo, and Karin Lee.
Each short film or video work takes up the theme of relationships; relationships to each other, to culture and language, to place, to the land, to nonhuman beings, to ourselves. Sometimes these relationships are fraught with fragmentation, dislocation and disappearances due to processes of colonialism, imperialism and ecological devastation. These works encourage us to explore the ways we relate to each other, to our worlds, to our histories and ways of being.
All are invited to view this free screening from November 5 â 18, 2020 on the online cinema venue, VUCAVU. As well, we are pleased to invite you to an online gathering on November 9 at 7:00 pm CT where Sovereign Intimacies curators Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith introduce screening program curators Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead who will engage in conversation with filmmakers Marissa Sean Cruz and LĂ©uli EshrÄghi.
Artist Bios
With a Bachelors of Fine Arts (major in Graphic Design) from the University of Québec, Sébastien Aubin has worked for Kolegram, one of the most prestigious graphic design studios in Québec, and has since shaped his professional career as a freelance graphic artist. Aubin has designed publications for numerous artists, organizations and art galleries in Winnipeg, Montréal and Ottawa, including Plug In ICA Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, Terrance Houle, KC Adams, Carleton University Art Gallery, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba. Aubin is one of the founding members of the ITWà collective that is dedicated to research, creation, production and education of Aboriginal digital culture. Currently based in Montréal, QC, Sébastien Aubin is a proud member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba.
Karin Lee æćæ is a media artist whose films, installations and writing spans over two decades, with fiction and non-fiction films reflecting the contemporary issues of our day as well as the themes of the Asian diaspora, women, gender, identity and sexuality. Her solo show at the Sum Gallery in Vancouverâs Art in Pride Society, was the inaugural exhibition in Vancouver. As a filmmaker, Karin co-produced Cedar and Bamboo, a documentary about children of Chinese and First Nations parents, wrote, directed and produced the web series Plan B, a dark comedic drama about an abortion clinic, and is currently in post-production for Girl with Big Feet (Tsâekoo Cha Ke), a period drama. A fourth generation Canadian, Karin was born, raised and is based in Vancouver, B.C. Canada.
Marissa Sean Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kâjipuktuk (Halifax) with a focus in video and digital arts. As a biracial Filipinx, Cruzâs work negotiates a layered socioracial identity in sculptural confrontations, conceptual systems and prop-comedy performances. Her work has been displayed in venues like Xpace, Studio 303, Studio Rialto, Galerie VAV Gallery, ThirdSpace and START gallery and distributed digitally through spaces like the Centre for Art and Thought, North Fork Arts Projects, Public Parking and the Roundtable Residency.
Francisco Huichaqueo (Mapuche) studied documentary filmmaking at the Escuela de Cine de Chile. In addition to being a filmmaker, Francisco is a curator of video art, animation and experimental films and currently teaches animation and experimental video at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.
Hopinkaâs work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, a recipient of an Alpert Award for Film/Video, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Dr LĂ©uli EshrÄghi (SÄmoan, Persian, Cantonese) works across visual arts, curatorial practice and university research. Ia intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faÊ»afafine-faÊ»atama from kinship and knowledge structures. Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching and rights advocacy. EshrÄghi is a board secretary of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, the inaugural Horizon/Indigenous Futures postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, a member of The Space Between Us SSHRC research partnership (2020-28) led by Dr Julie Nagam, an affiliate member of the Wominjeka Djeebana research lab at Monash University led by Dr Brian Martin, and a member of the Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network led by Dr Danny Butt at University of Melbourne and Kurniawan Adi Saputro at Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta.
Curator Bios
Mariana Muñoz Gomezis an emerging artist, writer, and curator. She is a settler of colour based on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her work is concerned with language, representation, diaspora, displacement and identity within post- and settler colonial contexts. She is a coeditor of Carnation Zine and co-curator at window winnipeg. Mariana recently completed a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg.
Marie-Anne Redheadis Ininiw and francophone, as well as an emerging curator, writer and member of Fox Lake Cree Nation. She is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree at the University of Winnipeg with the intent to pursue an MA in the curatorial stream of the Cultural Studies program. Through her research and creative practice, she is interested in decolonial art forms, contemporary Indigenous art, futurisms, language, and relationship-based identities.
Sovereign Intimacies is a group exhibition curated by Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith, in partnership between Gallery 1C03 and Plug In ICA, with support from Video Pool Media Arts Centre. The exhibition takes place at Plug In ICA from September 26 â December 20, 2020, with extensive programming that consists of online talks, workshops, screenings, and poetry readings. Sovereign Intimacies explores themes of cultural and community exchange between Indigenous artists and artists from the diaspora, more specifically artists who are First Nations, Inuit and MĂ©tis collaborating with artists living in what is currently called Canada who came to this land and are not part of the settler/colonial history of the country. The group show consists of pairings of artists, as well as individuals, whose work is based on process and relationship building, and for those whose work is invested in active conceptualization around topics of friendship and intimacy, who are working to build collective vision of a sovereign future.
Acknowledgments:
Gallery 1C03, Plug In ICA and Video Pool Media Arts Centre are on Treaty 1 Territory. We are located on the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the MĂ©tis Nation.
This program acknowledges financial assistance for Sovereign Intimacies from The University of Winnipeg and the Manitoba Arts Council, as well as core support from our funders, Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank VUCAVU for presenting the Un/spoken screening program on their website.
For more information, contact:
Jennifer Gibson, Director/Curator, Gallery 1C03
or