VIVO Media Arts Centre is excited to host 'How Far Can A Marked Body Go?', a performance by Ghinwa Yassine, and a talkback session.
How Far Can A Marked Body Go? sheds the light on what the bodies of Lebanese women, marked by war and patriarchy, are capable of enacting. In this performance, Ghinwa Yassine aims to reinsert the body of women into the Lebanese historical narrative by portraying an agentic gesture, one in which a body is acting and not being subjected to. Through an interplay between re-enactment, archival images and animation, she tells a story of using one’s embodied agency in the public arena and asks questions around boundaries, safety, appearance, and disappearance. How Far Can A Marked Body Go? insists on an incompleteness, repetitively shifting between the modes of lecture, performance, and video installation. Ultimately, Yassine is writing a story in space.
We look forward to the insights and discussions that will emerge from the experience. Join us for an evening of storytelling and exploration of the marked body.
Animation and technical direction: Conor Provenzano and Arman Paxad
Technical assistance: Elke Dick
Photo credit: Elke Dick
Archival photos by Sam Tarling, Nabil Ismail, and Richard Hall.
Ghinwa Yassine (Lebanon/Canada) is an anti-disciplinary artist, based on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh people. Her mixed media work includes film, installation, performance, sound, text and drawing. In her art, Yassine confronts the ideological and patriarchal systems that she grew up in while exploring collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. She seeks a radical historicizing of individual and collective traumas where embodied memories manifest through story, ritual, and gesture. She pursues community-based research around embodied writing and the healing potential of autobiographical art.
Yassine holds an MFA in contemporary art and interdisciplinary studies at Simon Fraser University, an MA in Digital Video Design from the University of the Arts Utrecht, and a BA in Graphic Design from the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut.
Mandana Mansouri is a displaced Kurdish artist and writer. Her exile started long before moving anywhere. She started forgetting her mother tongue when she went to school in 1988. Now she is remembering. As a physical being, she is an uninvited guest on the stolen land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ First Nations. In her mind, she is dancing with her people in front of a fire.