Futurist Myths is inspired by the ways in which artists construct myths as well as manipulate and transform existing ones through a poetic imaginary expressed in the filmic form. These films are futurist myths because they fracture the movement of time and attend to the instant at its most intimate formulation. Myths are the foundation of cultural histories and folkloric tales; they tell a people’s collective story. Futurist myths, on the other hand, come to tell the story of time and collectivity differently—of a history that is not yet past—by remaining loyal to the present and expressing the fictive power of cultural traditions. They invent, compose, re-imagine; they contextualize the unexpected; they form new images and access affects in new languages. They’re futurist because they’re transformative: time is dislodged from linearity, and narrative from history.

Futurist Myths honours the poetic composition of an image. The process of image-making is aligned with an active future—as we see to it now, as we attend to its urgencies in the present, as we intuit its possibilities. The futurist myths in this program invent a “strange positivity,” and attempt to celebrate new visions and imaginaries culled from prescribed histories. They are expressions that spiral out of an instant, moments captured in dream, intimacies revealed. In Kristin Li’s Two Snakes, we are compelled to think alongside the protagonist’s experience of the transference of memory. Malena Szlam’s Lunar Almanac is about the powerful urge to capture the still movement of a moon. In Untitled (Água Viva), Dylan Mira shares with us the subtle intimacies of tenderness. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme gently expose the complex tensions of entanglement in Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets, while Cauleen Smith in Remote Viewing memorializes an act of erasure.

Futurist Myths is about how stories are told, how they alter time, and how they create new images that capture current struggle. All of the films, in some way, touch on the intricacies of form, experimentation in language, and potent personal histories and memories. Futurist Myths frames the process born of the relation between affect and invention. Here articulation appears as that which belongs to the present of being and becoming.

-Nasrin Himada

PROGRAM

Noor Abed
Penelope, 2014
16mm, digital transfer, colour, silent
6 min. 28 sec.

Kristin Li
Two Snakes, 2015
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
9 min. 30 sec.

Malena Szlam
Lunar Almanac, 2013
16mm, colour, silent
4 min.

Dylan Mira
Untitled (Água Viva), 2013
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
12 min. 23 sec.

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets, 2016
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
10 min. 5 sec.

Cauleen Smith
Remote Viewing, 2011
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
15 min. 25 sec.

Total Running Time: 57:51

ARTISTS AND WORKS

Noor Abed
Penelope, 2014
16mm, digital transfer, silent
6 min. 28 sec.

Inspired by the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem from Greek Mythology, this work is based on the concept of myth; its position in history and relation to the present and the imaginary. This film was shot in Palestine, attempting to reflect a reality other than the one history offers. Here, myth could be seen as a collective dream and public imagination.

Noor Abed (1988, Jerusalem), received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, and a BA from the International Academy of Arts Palestine. Noor has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City 2015-2016, and was selected for the summer residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA, 2014. Selected exhibitions and participations include: YAYA 2014: ‘Suspended Accounts’, Ramallah, Palestine. UCLA New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles 2014.‘TransBorder – Utopias and Realities’, Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2014. ‘My Sister Who Travels’, The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2014. Printemps de Septembre Festival/ FIEA, France 2012. Truth is Concrete, Art Marathon, Graz, Austria 2012. The Ninth Annual Performance Festival, Norway 2011. Jerusalem Show: On/Off language 2011. Abed was recipient of fellowship at Documenta(13), department of Maybe Education and Public Programs, Germany 2012.

Kristin Li
Two Snakes, 2015
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
9 min. 30 sec.

An experimental animation and documentary about diasporic desires for foundational myths. Seeking a home in reclaimed ancestry and seeking a self in reappropriated narratives and finding fragments instead. Features original score by Julie Matson. Created for OEDIV CISUM (May 9 2015), a night of video art accompanied by live soundtracks.

Kristin Li was born in Chengdu, China, and currently lives and works in Montreal. As an emerging multimedia artist, Kristin creates installations, animations, documentaries, and experimental narratives that explore contemporary formations of power. These projects recontextualize familiar stories, practices, and institutions to reveal the ways that they constrain us in spite of our intentions, and the hidden sites of possibility that we can nonetheless exploit. Kristin’s work has been shown across North America, South America, and Europe, with recent screenings at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany), Vidéoformes (France), and MIX NYC (US).

Malena Szlam
Lunar Almanac, 2013
16mm, colour, silent
4 min.

Lunar Almanac uses in-camera editing and frame-by-frame photography to create multi-layered field views of the phases of the moon.

“Lunar Almanac initiates a journey through magnetic spheres with its staccato layering of single-frame, long exposures of a multiplied moon. Shot in 16mm Ektachrome and hand processed, the film’s artisanal touches are imbued with nocturnal mystery.”
-Andréa Picard, TIFF Wavelengths, 2014

Malena Szlam (b. Chile) is an artist filmmaker based in Montreal. The film medium has been central to her practice, manifesting in diverse forms including cinema, installation, and performance. Her practice is driven by an interest in relationships between the natural world, human perception and intuitive process, in time-based poetic creations that engage with the material aspects of film. Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues worldwide, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Toronto, New York, Ann Arbor, and Hong Kong Film Festivals, 25 FPS (Zagreb), Media City (Windsor), Images Festival (Toronto), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Montréal), and YYZ Gallery (Toronto). Szlam is a member of Double Negative, a Montreal-based artists’ film collective dedicated to the exhibition and production of experimental film.

Dylan Mira
Untitled (Água Viva), 2013
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
12 min. 30 sec.

Untitled features the filmmaker’s ailing father reading aloud from Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva from his home hospital bed; his recitation is punctuated by his announcements of distaste for the book as well as by acerbic, tender commentary from his wife about her husband’s character and life.

Dylan Mira is women liminally Los Angeles and on the Internet. It is the Art Institute of Chicago School Video BFA and UCLA she holds a MBA in new genres. His work has been exhibited in nature- this site, the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Chicago Underground Film Festival, depressed and magazines, the Institute of Contemporary Art and including the preservation of the artist Anthology Film on display posting normal a wide screen space.

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets, 2016
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
10 min.

Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets is structured around footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera. On March 19, 2014, 14 year-old Yusuf ­Shawamreh crossed the ‘separation fence’ erected by the Israeli military near Hebron. He was going to pick Akub, an edible plant that grows at high altitudes and blooms for only a short period of time, and a delicacy in Palestinian cuisine. Israeli forces ambushed him and shot him dead. After a court injunction the military surveillance footage was released and consequently circulated online. The piece invites us to consider the forms of entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice probes a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is increasingly shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary can emerge. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on the idea of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Their practice, largely research based, frequently investigates the spatio-temporal resonances of seemingly disparate moments. Overwhelmingly their approach has been one of sampling materials (both existing and self-authored) in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.

Cauleen Smith
Remote Viewing, 2011
Single channel HD video, colour, stereo sound
15 min.

“I heard the story of a man who as a boy watched the whites in his town try to erase every trace of the black community by digging a deep hole and burying the Negro schoolhouse in it. There was this horrible intersection between the sublime and the obscene in the man’s description. What does it mean that your need for erasure would be so intense that you would dig a hole and bury a whole structure underground? That took me right back to the land art guys. So, that was the beginning. I had to work very quickly—the scale of the project was so huge that once a piece of land and money became available, I had to make the film or never make it.”
-Cauleen Smith

Born in Sacramento, California, in the late ’60s, Smith is definitively a West Coast filmmaker, who in the ’80s also spent a great deal of time soaking in the dense international urbanism specific to places such as Brixton in south London. Cauleen Smith’s interdisciplinary practice merges improvisational music, speculative fiction, African-American history, and processional forms to create temporal and spatial ruptures that make room for new affinities, empathies, and consciousnesses. Smith’s films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; Houston Contemporary Art Museum, TX; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; D21 Leipzig, Germany; Yerba Buena Center for Arts, CA; and the New Museum, NY. She has had solo shows at The Kitchen in New York City, MCA Chicago and Threewalls in Chicago; and Women & Their Work in Austin, TX. Her work has also been featured in such high profile festivals as Sundance and screened twice by demand at the prestigious Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Exhibition. In 1999, she was selected as one of Ten Directors to Watch by “Variety” magazine. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including a Creative Capital grant, the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Chicago 3Arts Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Arcadia Chicago, and The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Smith earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives in Chicago while teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Art low-residency MFA program.
More information: cauleensmith.com

CURATOR

Nasrin Himada

Nasrin Himada is a writer, editor, and curator residing in Toronto. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on experimental cinema, the relationship between art and poetry, and the militarization of urban space through prison infrastructure and police surveillance. She has lectured extensively on these topics, including presentations at California Institute of the Arts, Georgetown University, and INCA Seattle. Her curatorial work has been exhibited at DHC/ART: Foundation for Contemporary Art, Echo Park Film Center, 16 Beaver, and Image + Nation. From 2011 to 2016, Nasrin co-edited the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy. She is the co-editor of the inaugural issue of MICE Magazine on the theme of invisible labour, and is presently the curator at Art Metropole.

INTERLOCUTOR

Juan Ortiz-Apuy

Juan Ortiz-Apuy was born in Costa Rica in 1980 and lives and works in Montreal since 2003. Ortiz-Apuy has a BFA from Concordia University, a post-graduate diploma from the Glasgow School of Art, and a MFA from NSCAD University.

His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Gallery TPW, ARTSPACE, Eastern Edge Gallery, A Space Gallery, The MacLaren Arts Centre and the Quebec City Biennial: Manif d’Art 7.

His work has been reviewed and published in various magazines, newspapers and books; notable examples include The Brave New Avant Garde by Marc James Léger and reviews in Canadian Art, Le Devoir, The Gazette (Montreal), The Telegram (St. John’s), The Toronto Star, and at MOMUS.ca.

Ortiz-Apuy has completed artist-in-residency programs at, among others places, the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, and the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, USA. Upcoming exhibitions include Gallery 44, TYPOLOGY Projects, and Museum London, as well as an artist-in-residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Ortiz-Apuy is represented by Gallery Antoine Ertaskiran.