The Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery offers outreach programming that supports engaged, self-reflexive and critical forms of viewership on site, online, and beyond the Gallery and University. Working with our local communities in Montreal and circulating our exhibitions abroad, the Gallery’s outreach programing privileges and amplifies the critical angles that context, standpoint and experience can bring to thinking about and engaging with art and exhibition making.

PROGRAM FOR THE ARABIC SPEAKING COMMUNITY | برنامج باللغة العربية

Chantal Partamian, Collection Katsakh, 2023, digitized Super8 photogram

Mediterranean Explorations: Evolving archives and varied perspectives is a public program initiated by the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, examining the visual archives of the region around the Mediterranean Sea. Inviting artist-archivist Chantal Partamian to explore the constantly evolving nature of archives, the program proposes looking beyond their traditional representation as mere static collections of documents. The program questions the preservation of the integrity and completeness of archives, taking into account the challenges of displaced archives, particularly in former colonized territories and during periods of armed conflict. It also aims to broaden understanding of archives as dynamic entities, highlighting the multiple affiliations and diverse interests of stakeholders. Starting on December 5th and throughout the winter three presenters will participate.

In its first iteration, Chantal Partamian will present her research around collecting amateur films on celluloid, containing images of towns and villages in the eastern and southern Mediterranean between the 1930s and 1970s.

Program participants over the next months include Dhakira Collective, an independent research, archiving and curatorial platform, highlighting art, film and music outside the Western canon, with a particular focus on cinema from the Southwest Asian and North African region (SWANA). A conversation will also take place with Sevan Injejikian, whose multidisciplinary project includes an online database aimed at rectifying the historical oversight of certain Armenian women writers of the Ottoman Empire, due to their gender and ethnicity. Inejikian’s work highlights the issues of contact, erasure and historical risk. The conversation addresses the urgency of locating, documenting and sharing these archives within a feminist and decolonial framework.

DISRUPTING THE ARCHIVE: ECHOES OF ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES IN POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA

A talk by Dhakira Collective

Wednesday May 22, 6:30 pm
In English, French and Arabic
Free, at SHIFT – Centre for Social Transformation (room LB-145 next to the Gallery)

Disrupting the archive: echoes of alternative histories in postcolonial cinema, is the third and final iteration of Mediterranean Explorations: Evolving archives and varied perspectives. Following an invitation by Chantal Partamian, Dhakira Collective will give a talk on the role of oral history and the visual archive in postcolonial cinema.

Oral histories permeate the films of the internationalist post-independence Third Cinema movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Moroccan cinema in particular, a special interest of Dhakira Collective, is a site where ancestral modes of storytelling are rehabilitated to resist hegemonic historiography.

Dhakira Collective will discuss the persistence of collective memory as recorded in subversive filmmaking and across colonial archives, using multiple examples to illustrate the reversal of the colonial gaze and the defiant manipulation of historical materials made possible within these art objects. Temporality is a central motif in this process of resistance: the fundamental urge to preserve the past by collecting the fragments of those who have been forcibly forgotten, opening the possibility for an encounter with history that places the past in direct dialogue with the present.

Dhakira Collective is an independent research, archival and curatorial platform that foregrounds art, cinema, and music outside the western canon with a particular focus on cinema from the SWANA region (South West Asia & North Africa). The archive currently boasts a catalog of over 150 films by filmmakers from 60+ countries such as Bolivia, Djibouti, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, and more, with a range of narrative feature lengths, documentaries, shorts, and experimental moving image. Dhakira Collective was founded by Moroccan-Canadian film programmers and researchers Bouchra Assou and Gaïa Guenoun in July 2020.

Chantal Partamian is an experimental filmmaker and archivist. Her work explores themes of migration, identity, conflict and obsolescence, using mainly Super 8mm and found footage. Her archival activities focus on the preservation and restoration of reels from the Mediterranean basin, combined with research into archival practices in regions of conflict. Partamian’s films have been presented and awarded at numerous festivals. They are distributed by Vidéographe, Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) and the Canadian filmmakers distribution center (CFMDC).