At VIVO Media Arts Centre
2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver, Canada
Situated on the stolen Unceded Coast Salish Territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Archive/Counter Archive (ACA) in collaboration with VIVO and the LASA Film Studies and Visual Culture section, invites you to a screening of Latin American Video Art curated by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda and a selection of Latin American materials at The Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive (CMDLA). This event is part of Archive/Counter Archive’s case study on Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediations. The evening features an in-house screening, discussion, archival displays, media library, and tour of the Archives. This event will include online components.
Taking the documentation of a series of events surrounding the 1987 Women Art and the Periphery (WAP) program (curated by Sara Diamond and organized by Video Inn [now VIVO]and Women In Focus) as a point of departure, this screening and library viewing program features a selection of Latin American video, sound and archival documentation that address gendered violence through a multigenerational and intersectional lens. The program includes established and emerging artists, including Venezuelan born–Barcelona based Valentina Alvarado Matos, Brazilian Cynthia Domenico and Chileans Gloria Camiruaga, Tatiana Gaviola and Soledad Farina, which are part of VIVOs Women Art and Periphery Collection.
Prior to the main screening Elena Shtromberg will screen Selections from Sonia Andrade, Untitled 1974-78 (1974-1978). These short vignettes are some of the earliest videos produced in Brazil. Created during the height of censorship in Brazil during the military dictatorship, the video experiments comprising Untitled posit the body as the site of tensions, probing its limit as subject and object of electronic display. Andrade organizes her body in a direct critique of the dictatorship, situating it in precarious situations recalling scenes of torture and violence.
To celebrate the recent publication of Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Getty Publications, 2023) edited by Elena Shtromberg and Glenn Phillips and to contextualize the relevance of VIVOs Latin American collections within the histories of video art and independent media production in the region, Shtromberg will join Ana Valine, Susan Lord, Karen Knights, Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, Sarah Shamash and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda in a discussion about collections, archives and Latin American video distribution networks across the Americas.
Viewing and listening stations will feature audio recordings from VIVOs event archives and individual works from our video library that broaden the scope to diverse perspectives on violence, touching on the legacies of colonialism on queer bodies, the experiences of political exile, the crossing of militarized borders, living under a dictatorship, queer science fiction and identity politics and art-making in Canada. Works available on library video and audio stations include those by María Magdalena Campos Pons, José Bedia, Ximena Cuevas, Emilio Rojas, Sarah Shamash, Mauricio Saenz, Diego Ramírez, Sakino Sepúlveda, Carlos Yamil Neri Maldonado, and a selection of Women Art and the Periphery Collection including Lotty Rosenfeld, Damiela Eltit, Sybil Brintrup and Magali Meneses.
This event features video art with Spanish and Portuguese language content.
See archive.vivomediaarts.com for more info starting May 10th.
Gabriela is an interdisciplinary media artist and cultural historian with a research focus on Latin American feminist media arts. Working at the intersections of video and performance, she uses video and multimedia installations to explore the social, political, and cultural structures that shape our sense of self. She is assistant professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, and a member of the Vancouver-based AKA collective. Gabriela won the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 John Bullen Prize honouring the outstanding Ph.D. thesis on a historical topic submitted in a Canadian university by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident ( “Mujeres Que Se Visualizan”: (En)Gendering Archives and Regimes of Media and Visuality in post-1968 Mexico).
Sarah Shamash’s research creation practice is committed to decolonial, feminist critique and action; it encompasses film, art, writing, curation, and education. Her artworks comprise the use of media in a wide variety formats such as installation, documentary, photography, sound, performance, and video. They have been shown in curated exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Her work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema as a pluriversal technology of knowledge. She gratefully raises her son and lives on the unsurrendered and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh First Nations in what is known as Vancouver.
Karen previously worked at VIVO as Librarian, Distributor, and Programming Coordinator (1984-1999) and as an independent curator and critic. She has a special passion for artist-run centre archives and has been commissioned to create historical surveys and touring exhibitions for EM Media (Calgary) and ED Video (Guelph), and writings based on the Western Front and VIVO collections. Her essay “Abundant Harvest: The Recordings of Calgary Video Artists and Independents” was recently included in EM Media’s 30th anniversary publication “Expanded Standard Time”.
Gabriela is an interdisciplinary media artist and cultural historian with a research focus on Latin American feminist media arts. Working at the intersections of video and performance, she uses video and multimedia installations to explore the social, political, and cultural structures that shape our sense of self. She is assistant professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, and a member of the Vancouver-based AKA collective. Gabriela won the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 John Bullen Prize honouring the outstanding Ph.D. thesis on a historical topic submitted in a Canadian university by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident ( “Mujeres Que Se Visualizan”: (En)Gendering Archives and Regimes of Media and Visuality in post-1968 Mexico).