Opening
Saturday, November 12, 3 – 5 pm
Performances
Photo: Paul Litherland
Marie Claire Forté in collaboration with Alanna Kraaijeveld, and with the assistance of Sophie Bélair Clément, Hugues Dugas, Claudia Fancello, Yves Forté, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, k.g. Guttman, Kelly Keenan and Michèle Thériault
Collections de danses de Christian Rizzo, Gene Kelly et Stanley Donen, Édouard Lock, William Forsythe, Merce Cunningham, Saburo Teshigawara, Trisha Brown; Jeffrey Daniel, Michael Jackson et Vincent Patterson, Mats Ek, Dana Michel; Dana Foglia, Chris Grant et JaQuel Knight, Crystal Pite, Pina Bausch, Lloyd Newson, Tedd Robinson, Hofesh Shechter, Bob Fosse, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Daniel Linehan, Amanda Acorn, Jiři Kilyán, Akram Khan, Stijn Celis, Deborah Hay, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Meg Stuart et Philipp Gehmacher, Marie Claire Forté, Trajal Harrell, k.g. Guttman, Benoît Lachambre, Jerome Robbins, Louise Lecavalier, Solange et d’autres
Schedule of performances:
Tuesday, November 15 – 5 pm
Saturday, November 19 – 4 pm
Saturday, November 26 – 4 pm
Tuesday, November 29 – 5 pm
Saturday, December 3 – 5 pm
Saturday, December 10 – 4 pm
Tuesday, December 13 – 5 pm
Thursday, December 15 – 5 pm
My friend and long-time collaborator Alanna Kraaijeveld and I looked for recordings of dances we enjoy, learned them, and repurposed them for our dancing pleasure. The material – a series of choreographic excerpts unceremoniously strung together – requires that we use our extensive dance training, so rarely called upon in this way throughout our respective careers. We celebrate technique without focusing on virtuosity. We happily offer the energy of dance in the gallery – although as Alanna says, we can’t give it all away. A set of screens obstructs and deconstructs our bodies as mid-career dancers, as women no longer young. The collection reveals the labour of dancing and remembering, the random specificity of movement vocabulary, repetition, process and friendship. We will perform the work eight times over the course of the exhibition and our repertoire will continue to grow throughout as we learn and add new excerpts.
Screenings
K8 Hardy, Outfitumentary, 2016. Video still. Copyright K8 Hardy; Courtesy of the artist, Hardy Studio and Picture Palace Pictures
At the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
K8 Hardy
Outfitumentary, 2016
Video, colour, sound
82 min., English
Direction, photography and editing: K8 Hardy
Co-Production: Madeleine Molyneaux
Sound Design: Lynne Trepanier
Online Edition/Colourist: Drew Bolton
Produced by Hardy Studio, USA
Projected in the Gallery on Saturday, November 19 at 5:30 pm and Tuesday, December 13 at 6 pm
Copyright K8 Hardy; Courtesy of the artist, Hardy Studio and Picture Palace Pictures
In 2001, I set out on the structuralist journey that became my first feature film, Outfitumentary. I named the project at the outset, and considered it a document for posterity, an important record of the dress codes of a radical lesbian underground. The formal rules I imposed were simple: to roll my video camera and capture a shot of myself from head to toe with a turn to provide front and back. Ultimately, I played fast and loose with my own rules, but stayed true to my original intentions.
The film serves to express a fundamental principle that runs through my work and practice—the ways in which the body becomes its own medium. First and foremost, the film is a formal and structural exercise. It is less about narcissism—the narcissism that one might assume given that I am on camera for every frame of the film—than it is about identity, and the way in which both the materiality of the body and its subsequent “outfitting” —in private and public life—serves to refine, define and probe the very nature of the body politic.
As I was consistently shooting this project, my artistic practice tangentially grew to include live performance, often linked to a video signal. Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps not—I stopped shooting Outfitumentary in early 2012, when my camera finally broke. It was at the same period that I was included in the Whitney Biennial.
In the last few years, I returned to the footage I shot, and began crafting the project into a feature length film. I describe Outfitumentary as a gesamtkunstwerk.
Video as a democratic medium…
My formative years as an artist were spent making video art and experimental Super-8 films. I was interested in the art of cinema, and also in my own performance. I was interested in video as a democratic medium and in its ability to circulate so easily on tapes. I dove into shooting and hand-processing super-8, splicing my films by hand, and also working with 16mm.
I discovered video art through punk rock and riot Grrrl, and through artists and bands that were making videos in that scene. Video was the easiest way for me to make my own statement, to represent myself as a young angry woman, and to get the work out there. I had previously been making small zines and mailing them all over the states. I had a drive to tell my own story. This was a step beyond.
Video was also a way for me to express my queer identity and articulate my thoughts of gender as performance. I was connecting the sexual politics with the experiential. And I was connecting an experimental process with queer politics.
– K8 Hardy, New York, December 2015
Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie, 2015. Video still. Courtesy of Doc & Film international © Chantal Akerman
At the Cinémathèque québécoise
Chantal Akerman
No Home Movie, 2015
Video, colour, sound
Format 16:9, 112 min.
French with English subtitles
Direction, script, image, sound: Chantal Akerman
Editing: Claire Atherton
Assistance to editing: Clémence Carré
Sound mixing: Eric Lesachet
Calibration: Peter Bernaers
Postproduction: Julien Melebeck
Produced by Patrick Quinet, Serge Zeitoun & Chantal Akerman
Courtesy of Doc & Film international © Chantal Akerman
Screening with introduction by Krista Geneviève Lynes
Monday, November 28, 9 pm
Cinémathèque québécoise
335, De Maisonneuve Blvd East
This film is above all else about my late mother. About this woman who came to Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the abuses. This woman we only see in her apartment in Brussels. It’s a film about the changing world that my mother does not see.
Public Reading
Catherine Lalonde
Relire, relier : une lecture sèche
Tuesday, December 6, 6 – 10 pm
The poet and performer Catherine Lalonde undertook a marathon dry read of all her published texts. With no bodily effects or dramaturgy, she read in quick succession Jeux de brume (1991), Cassandre (2005), Corps étranger (2008), and her manuscript in progress, La Dévoration des fées (working title), in chronological order of publication date.
It will take the time that it takes. There might be some interruptions for a bit of chatting, a break. There might be some stammering. On the table, sources of inspiration and notes; some wine, tea, and water. The spectators are invited to come and go as they please, to read through the booklets, or to engage in the endurance test of listening to the entire reading, which will continue, from the first page of the first book to the back cover of the – as yet unpublished – fourth.
– I’d rather something ambiguous. Mais précis à la fois.
November 12 – December 16, 2016
An exhibition project by Sophie Bélair Clément and Marie Claire Forté with Chantal Akerman, Simon Guibord, Philippe Hamelin, K8 Hardy, Raphaël Huppé-Alvarez, Alanna Kraaijeveld, Catherine Lalonde, Isabelle Pauwels, Jason Simon, Robin Simpson, Elisabeth Subrin, Michèle Thériault, and an anonymous contribution
Realised as part of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Program in Support of Artistic Production