VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver’s oldest media access artist run centre presents Anamnesia: Unforgetting, a series of three screenings of videos from the 1970s and 1980s, collected through the early Satellite Video Exchange program. The videos are now housed in VIVO’s Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, a collection of 4500 titles of international video art and related ephemera. Emerging out of Intermedia, the Satellite Video Exchange collection documents important correspondence, performance and activist video collaborations in Vancouver’s art history.

The curators of Anamnesia: Unforgetting, Alex Muir, Donato Mancini and Cecily Nicholson will present their programs on November 15th, 22nd and 29th. The three events are accompanied by a publication, artist conversations, DVD box set and online component.

Muir will present a retrospective on early artist television pioneer Byron Black, who initiated Images from Infinity on Cable 10 and was affiliated with Robert Filliou’s Eternal Network, Image Bank and the Western Front. In 1980 he left for Southeast Asia and sent a trail of transnational video dispatches from Burma, Japan, Thailand and Indonesia to VIVO. Byron Black will be in attendance, returning to Vancouver for the first time in 30 years.

Mancini has curated a series of videos that draw parallels between Santiago, Chile and Vancouver, in the early 1980s. The videos chart the economic and social struggles each city experienced during the emergence of Neoliberalism. The Chilean videos were collected through a residency and exchange with the feminist video collective C.A.D.A.. Early works by Vancouver artists Sara Diamond, Lorna Boschman and Jane Wright are also presented.

Nicholson has restored video documents from 1973 to 1979 that address the Oglala Sioux and American Indian Movement stand at Wounded Knee. Curated amongst them are documents of concurrent narratives on prison asylum and the civil rights movement, including a lecture given by Angela Davis at UC Berkley and a documentary on prison inmates in a San Francisco jail. A number of protests, including a gathering to stop the extradition of Leonard Peltier at the Vancouver Art Gallery will be presented. Winnipeg based Anishnabe Writer, Marie Annharte,author of Indigena Awry, Being On the Moon, Coyote Columbus Café and Exercises in Lip Pointing, will read at the event.
PROGRAMS
THU NOV 15 / 7pm
What’s a sentient being like you doing in an incarnation like this?
Curated by Alex Muir
Byron Black in attendance
Byron Black (Baron Infinity) worked in film, video, and mail art in Vancouver throughout the 1970s. He hosted and produced Images from Infinity, a serialized art-television broadcast on Cable 10. In 1980 he left for Southeast Asia. An irregular trail of transnational dispatches traces the Baron’s impressions through Burma, Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia.

B-84: The Snowback Caper (1978). 12:00. Canada
Collapse of Time (1984). 3:30. Japan
B-84: Leaving the Ground (1981). 16:30. Japan
Made in Japan (1981). 16:55. Philippines/Japan
Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum (1974). 25:30. Canada
Three Towers of Osaka. Byron Black and Marlin Oliveros (1984). 18:50. Japan
Elephant Shrine at Rama VI Bridge (1986). 13:45. Thailand

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MON NOV 19 / 7:30pm
DIM Cinema at the Pacific Cinémathèque (offsite)
The Holy Assassin (1974). 65:00. Canada
Byron Black in attendance, in conversation with Tony Reif.
Tix: $10.50/$9 + $3membership
http://www.thecinematheque.ca/dim/the-holy-assassin

THU NOV 22 / 7pm
Year of the Strike, Hour of the Knife
Curated by Donato Mancini
Donato Mancini in conversation with Juan Manuel Sepulveda
Art videos and activist tapes from 1975–1989 that publicize the dialectic of Santiago, Chile and Vancouver, Canada within neoliberal mythology. Each tape engages multiple modes of resistance, in negotiation with the (always archival) process and structure of documentary.

Ay Sudamerica! C.A.D.A. (1981). 4:00. Chile
Untitled [transit interviews]. Ken Kuramoto (1986). 10:30. Canada
El Padre Mio. Lotty Rosenfeld. (1985). 10:00. Chile
Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento. Lotty Rosenfeld. (1979). 5:00. Chile
Ten Dollars or Nothing. Sara Diamond (1989). 12:00. Canada
Electronic Sunsets #35. Jane Wright (1975). 4:00. Canada
Your System Stinks: A Video About Welfare Rights. Lorna Boschman (1989). 13:00. Canada
Twu Tel. Amelia Productions (1981). 9:00. Canada
Somos +. Pablo Salas (1985). 12:00. Chile
Electronic Sunsets #43. Jane Wright (1975). 6:00. Canada
Scars. Lorna Boschman (1987). 12:00. Canada
Expo Forever. Rich Rommell (1987). 16:00. Canada

Juan Manuel Sepulveda is a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico Film School (CUEC-UNAM). In 2011 he won the Best Documentary Short Award at the Cinema du Réel Festival in Paris, with the film EXTRAÑO RUMOR DE LA TIERRA CUANDO SE ABRE UN SURCO (THE STRANGE SOUND OF THE LAND BEING OPENED IN A FURROW). His most recent feature film LECCIONES PARA UNA GUERRA (LESSONS FOR A WAR) won an Honorary Mention at the Morelia International Film Festival. Currently, he is pursuing a Master in Fine Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and pre-producing his third feature documentary OPPENHEIMER PARK.

THU NOV 29 / 7pm
DISPATCHES: of wrested resumption, in time and area
Curated by Cecily Nicholson
Reading by Anishnabe Writer Marie Annharte
Video documents spanning 1973–1979 that address the Oglala Sioux and American Indian Movement stand at Wounded Knee and concurrent narratives on asylum, liberation and civil rights movement, including Vancouver-local actions.

We are evidence of the Western Hemisphere (1976). 60:00. United States
Why Wounded Knee. Miles Mogulescu, AIM (1974). 28:00. United States
Wounded Knee Dispatch. Peter Berg (1973). 24:00. Canada
Stop the Extradition. Jan Darger (1976). 20:00. United States
The Trial of Leonard Peltier. Paul Burtness (1977). 20:00. United States
Angela Davis: UCLA Lecture. Leni Goldberg (1973). 48:00. United States
Dead Action. Optic Nerve (1976). 25:50. United States
Leonard Peltier Demonstration/Extradition. Alma House (1976). 55:00. Canada
Yvonne Wanrow. Daryl Lacey (1978). 28:00. Canada
Instead Of Prisons. Claire Culhane. (1979). 30:00 Canada

Marie Annharte Aka Annharte is an Anishinabe grandmother and writer.  Current works are Indigena Awry, poetry volume, and a collection of essays to be released this fall.  Her project Nokomis Storyteller Theatre connects with a cross-generational audience in Winnipeg. Publication credits: Being On the Moon, Coyote Columbus Café andExercises in Lip Pointing.

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OUTSIDE IN
Marie Annharte & Mercedes Eng reading
Saturday, December 1st, 7:00pm
hosted by Gallery Gachet 88 East Cordova Street
http://gachet.org/2012/11/26/outside-in/
|prison| “considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives” (Angela Davis) is a “violent, colonial project that requires the co-operation and complicity of countless people” (Amanda Gebhard). “It is  no longer possible – as if it ever were – to remain indifferent to the sight of another human being encaged. One must either share the degradation or be responsible for it” (Claire Culhane).

there is nothing inevitable about the logic of incarceration. experienced, riotous, irreverent poetics unmaking situations – make the thinkable, tenable and possible.