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Limited tickets available for non-Symposium Registrants at Showpass.
7 PM Archival Exhibits and Reception
7:45 PM Media Screening in the Studio
Featuring media from the Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive (CDMLA) and contemporary artists investigating, or inspired by, analog archival resources and their own community histories.
The evening features a screening of short media works including a new work by Dana Claxton, a display of past remediation projects from the CDMLA, and an exhibit of archival materials related to Case Study 1: Women's Labour History: Restaurant Work in the Greater Vancouver Area.
VIVO’s Programming team for this Crossing Fonds program is composed of third-generation settlers and recent immigrants. Our process is informed by our different perspectives, and our relationships and understanding of our place on this land. We bring our professional and life experiences and subjectivities to the media we choose to showcase. We employ consensus to resolve them. The selected artists have remediated archival fonds, oral histories, documentary film, home footage, discarded television recordings, and surfaced the sonic shadows (Igwe) resonant in abandoned archives.The Programming team echoes themes present in the Crossing Fonds case studies. It’s not surprising that the theme of “crossing” is woven through this selection - from the British Empire’s ocean crossings, their theft of cultural objects, and the erection of archives in the service of colonial propaganda; to a contemporary invocation of the boundary-crossing trickster, the coyote, as a symbol of this “precarious existence” (Haines) on these stolen, occupied and unceded territories.The artists consider how objects are “markers for recording territories, histories and truths” (Claxton); how the queering of an archive can enable trans men and women to speak across generations; and how Indigenous and racialized people have excavated personal and institutional archives to reposition community histories.We hope these media works resonate with your conversations and imaginations.
Genki Ferguson, Karen Knights, nazanin oghanian, Arman Paxad, Carla Ritchie
Programming team
April 2024
The on-demand screening is available through this Vimeo showcase. If you are a Symposium registrant, you've received the password in your Crossing Fonds Symposium package. If you have any questions, contact info@vivomediaarts.com.
This work was the 3rd stage of my personal research with my mother, Kultsia-Barbara Wyss, who spent 7 years in the St Paul’s Residential School and went on to spend years in Day School, through St Edmonds. Both of these schools were/are in North Vancouver and are walking distance from where my mother grew up. It is a conversation over tea, about her time at Residential School, and how she witnessed her life from a young girl to her elder hood, and the many challenges she faced as well as endured as a result of attending these schools. It is a legacy piece that I created for her grandchildren to hear her personal story. It is meant to either be heard in its entirety or to be heard at any point in the timeline.
stuck between an archive and an aesthetic, is an experimental video essay mining lost and forgotten voices reverberating inside and outside the institution. Matharu uses event documentation from discarded videotapes as a starting point to explore what is missing from the archive. Remixing this found material that travels outside the museum walls, witnessing significant uprisings and returning back inside the institution where she asks; what exactly has or has not changed in the often-misunderstood area of “diversity programming?"
After discovering case files from a 1950s gender clinic, a cast of trans actors turn a talk show inside out to confront the legacy of a young trans woman forced to choose between honesty and access.
The "Digit Logic Lecture" is an unanimated episode of the "Digit" series, recorded on a week when Vander Zaag was unable to access the computer to create a new work. Vander Zaag created Digit to be a digital foil for her analog identity. This early work is a basis of the artist’s concern with what it is to be the human in human-computer interactions. Digit Recalls the Future (1978) is a futuristic animation made of drawings, programming text, and male and female voices in the style of a language lesson in which it is observed that “everyone will wear little devices, which record audio and video of everything in their lives.”
The work interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery. [Captioned]
In Caribou in the Archive, rustic VHS home video of a Cree woman hunting caribou in the 1990s is combined with NFB archival film footage of northern Manitoba from the 1950s. In this experimental film, the difference between homemade video and official historical record is considered. Northern Indigenous women hunting is at the heart of this personal found footage film in which the filmmaker describes the enigmatic events that led to saving an important piece of family history from being lost forever. [Subtitled]
Fonds Crossing - considers Indigenous and “western” fonds literally meeting in the middle and crossing over each other via two figures whom pass objects from the Indigenous archive to be placed in the western archive. From white/ grey boxes to parfleche boxes and baskets/ the exchange considers value / mutual respect and relations to the natural world. The artist is considering how history, and stories are marked and recorded and how paper or video tape and rattle or a stone or drum - are all markers for recording territories, histories and truths.
100 years after the Anti-Asian race riots in Vancouver Canada, media artist Karin Lee questions the relationship between immigration, labour and business while commenting on the current phenomenon of globalization. Shattered brings together two historic perspectives of the riots while locating it within contemporary Vancouver. Created during an artist-in-residency program at VIVO Media Arts Centre, the work was shown as a two channel site-specific video installation in Vancouver's Chinatown and Japantown on the night of the 100th anniversary of the riots - September 7th, 1907. [Text based translation]
Coyote’s historical and cultural significance across Native nations is as a trickster, a figure that both learns from his mistakes and complicates matters. Its fundamental nature provides a unique perspective: Coyote mirrors our own actions of adaptation and survival, standing like us in the shadow of a dominant society, amid urban sprawls, colonial ramifications and the realities of expansion. His evolving presence in the land represents a convergence of nature, tradition and society within the space he historically occupies.
—
* The title of this event is a quotation from Jennifer Dysart’s Caribou in the Archive, 2019.
- Image: Dana Claxton, Fonds Crossing, 2024.
VIVO is located in the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in a warehouse space at 2625 Kaslo Street south of East Broadway at the end of E 10th. Transit line 9 stops at Kaslo Street on Broadway. From the bus stop, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight decline. The closest skytrain station is Renfrew Station, which is three blocks south-east of VIVO and has an elevator. From there, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight incline. There is parking available at VIVO, including wheelchair access parking. There is a bike rack at the entrance. The front entrance leads indoors to a set of 7 stairs to the lobby.
A wheelchair ramp is located at the west side of the main entrance. The ramp has two runs: the first run is 20 feet long, and the second run is 26 feet. The ramp is 60 inches wide. The slope is 1:12. The ramp itself is concrete and has handrails on both sides. There is an outward swinging door (34 inch width) at the top of the ramp leading to a vestibule. A second outward swinging door (33 inch width) opens into the exhibition space. Buzzers and intercoms are located at both doors to notify staff during regular office hours or events to unlock the doors. Once unlocked, visitors can use automatic operators to open the doors.
There are two all-gender washrooms. One has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The other is a single room with a urinal and is wheelchair accessible: the door is 33 inches wide and inward swinging, without automation. The toilet has 11 inch clearance on the left side and a handrail.
To reach the bathrooms from the studio, exit through the double doors and proceed straight through the lobby and down the hall . Turn left, and the two bathrooms will be on your right side. The closest one has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The far bathroom is accessible.
Pamila Matharu is an immigrant-settler of Panjabi-Sikh descent, born in Birmingham, England, based in Tkarón:to (Toronto).
As an artist, they explore a range of transdisciplinary feminist issues, blurring the lines between objects, activism, community organizing, and public pedagogies. Their practices include; object making (installation, collage, film/video/photography), curating/organizing, artist-led teaching, arts advocacy, and social practice. A graduate of Visual Arts and Bachelor of Fine Art Education Programmes (York University), they will begin their Master of Visual Studies in September 2024 at University of Toronto.
Terry Haines was a multi-disciplinary artist of Secwepemc/Welsh- Tsilhqot'in/French ancestry. His practice, rooted in storytelling, addresses social and cultural issues impacting First Nations as well as our treatment of the environment. His short videos and installations have been exhibited and screened across Canada, the USA, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Germany and Mexico. Terry passed away on March 2, 2013.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories . The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound.
Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Modern Mondays, MoMA, Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London, 2017; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2020, and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival, 2015 and 2020; Open City Documentary Film Festival 2021 and 2022, Rotterdam International, Netherlands, 2018, 2019 and 2020; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, 2016; Images Festival, Canada, 2019, and the Smithsonian African American film festival, USA, 2018.
Karin Lee is a Canadian media artist and filmmaker. Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, Karin’s films are influenced by her upbringing: both her parents were activists who worked in the downtown Eastside, with her father running a Chinese communist bookstore at 33 East Hastings from the mid-1960s to '80s. Her interest in Chinese Canadian identity, feminism and social justice activism informs her narrative films, experimental video, documentaries and original dramatic films she has written, directed and produced since 1991. Lee’s work has been recognized by The Canada Award Gemini (Canadian Screen Award) from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television; BC Leo Diversity in Cultures Award; Yorkton Film Festival's Golden Sheaf award and the Hollywood North Film Awards.
Jennifer Dysart is an archive enthusiast and researcher with a deep love of found footage and experimental filmmaking. Her growing body of work disrupts the power of colonial archives through a commitment to returning archived media to the Indigenous people and homelands where they were recorded. Caribou in the Archive (2019) and Kewekapawetan: Return After the Flood (2014) are stories centred on family and community history and offer a critique of colonial power reflected through archival finds. Jennifer was born and raised in Alberta and BC and currently resides on the Haudenosaunee territory in Hamilton Ontario. She has Cree roots on her Dad’s side of the family from O’Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation, otherwise known as South Indian Lake, Manitoba. Through the A/CA she was Artist-In-Residence at Library and Archives Canada in 2019 and developed a perpetual research and screening project called Revisiting Keewatin made from source material documenting Catholic missionary activity in north and central Canada.
I have experimented with computers and video since 1974.
I received an MA from UBC in 2007 and ran Western Front multimedia -1993-1999 as well as teaching at SFU before that.
My personal research explored emotional and cultural sensibilities in interactive systems.
In response to the lack of human emotional bandwidth in human computer interface I developed emotional speech recognition software SAY. In 2000 I produced an interactive speech installation entitled Talk Nice in which you have to talk up at the end of your sentence to continue interacting
VIVO and V/Tape have distributed my single channel works for over 50 years in many exhibitions.
I am retired from restoring and managing heritage apartment buildings. In 2006 we received a City of Vancouver Heritage Award
Currently I am exploring the materiality of the digital by weaving spectrograph images of whale and bird sounds on a Jacquard loom at the Vancouver Textile Art Society.Creating a material object is also a response to the amount of digital artwork that I have lost to obsolete operating and data storage systems.
Web 3.0 fascinates me with the potential for decentralized computing, blockchain, to manage AI in a way that asserts our humanity.
Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), and more. Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections. She is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and resides in Vancouver.
Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His debut documentary feature, Framing Agnes, was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton. Joynt is the author of two books: the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. Most recently, he directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories, now streaming on Netflix.With Samantha Curley, Chase runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles.
Dr T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss is an Indigenous Matriarch of the Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo and Hawaiian people. Through her work as an ethnobotanist, artist, activist and community-based educator, she strives to share Indigenous customs, teachings, and futures and to connect with other Indigenous peoples. Wyss’s thirty-year career encompasses a vast array of practices, from weaving, developing traditional indigenous remedies, medicine and cultural walks to the realm of Indigi Digital Futurisms. T’uy’t’tanat’s interactive, community-based work is insightful and informative of their contemporary conditions. Wyss is a collaborator, deeply involved in community building, and finds dialogue with communities crucial in exchanging knowledge and critical in preserving Indigenous understanding of the land and ecosystems. Wyss has shared these teachings in public institutions and organizations and has participated in creative and collaborative projects that share the many different methods of indigenous cultures in stewarding this effort in preservation.
Genki Ferguson was born in New Brunswick to a family of writers and grew up in Calgary. He spent much of his childhood in the subtropical island of Kyushu, Japan, where his mother's family still resides. Fluent in Japanese and capable of making a decent sushi roll, Genki was the recipient of the 2017 Helen Pitt Award for visual arts, and recently completed a degree in Film Production.
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”.
nazanin is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and arts administrator. Her artistic practice emerges from critical reflection on concepts such as body, identity, gender, memory, politics, and the ongoing interplay between the individual and society. nazanin’s recent work explores power relations and the ways in which women’s bodies are controlled through the medicalization of their bodies and reproductive health. Working mostly with video, audio, and other sensory stimulative installations, she is interested in discrete components of the auditory, visual and gestural aspects of memory and control. She is a recipient of the BC Binning Memorial Fellowship, and her work has been exhibited across Iran and Canada including VIVO Media Arts, AHVA Gallery, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, and Morris And Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Following the completion of her MFA in Visual Arts from UBC in 2020, nazanin has worked and collaborated with several not-for-profit art organizations in recent years, including Vancouver New Music, Western Front, VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver Art Gallery, and The Dance Centre.
Carla has been working in performing arts for over twenty-five years and has been lucky to have done shows in every major Canadian city, from Victoria to Halifax. She is a highly accomplished arts leader, production/stage manager, technical director, and video designer. Carla has worked with some of the heaviest hitters in Canadian Theatre. She has toured across Canada, the USA, and China twice. Her favourite companies include Electric Company, Red Sky Performance, Canadian Stage, The Globe Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, One Yellow Rabbit, Debajehmujig-Storytellers, and the National Arts Centre. She is also pursuing her MBA at SFU Beedie School of Business to improve her skills to support the arts community.
