Cinema Meets The Visual Arts At TIFF08 With Moving-Image Projects Throughout The City Of Toronto
Toronto – The Toronto International Film Festival presents Future Projections, seven installation-based works with inspired connections to the history and the culture of cinema. Presented outside the cinema space and throughout Toronto, Future Projections continues a remarkable city-wide collaboration with leading cultural institutions, bolstering Toronto’s reputation as a centre of excellence and innovation. Venues include the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Stephen Bulger Gallery/CAMERA, Craig Scott Gallery, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and the Drake Hotel. The seven installations will be offered as free, non-ticketed events.
“With Future Projections 2008 we are continuing to explore new film-based art forms and the diversity of ideas with dynamic links to film culture, says Noah Cowan, Artistic Director, Bell Lightbox. “Bell Lightbox will be a year-round incubator for ideas, and inspirations and we will look forward to fostering new experiences and relationships.”
This year, Future Projections features a diverse array of moving-image talent, well-known visual artists Glenn Ligon and Margaux Williamson share space on the programme with emerging talents Samuel Chow, multidisciplinary artist Clive Holden and Marco Brambilla, and established film directors Srinivas Krishna and Philip Haas, approaching the gallery for the first time.
International art star Glenn Ligon returns to Toronto in a follow up to his hugely successful Power Plant exhibition of 2005. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter directed a 14-minute silent film version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular 19thcentury novel. In his three channel video installation, The Death of Tom, Glenn Ligon focuses on the last scene of the film, depicting the death of Tom, the slave whose tragic story drives the narrative. The installation focuses on the mechanics of the (re)making of the original production, the failure of the project’s representation and a narrative that - like the larger historical narratives it refers to - remains unfinished business. Cinematography is contributed by renowned filmmaker Deco Dawson.
Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art MOCCA Project Room at 952 Queen Street West. September 6 through 28, from Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Opening reception on Thursday, September 11 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Filmmaker Philip Haas, a successful interlocutor between film and the visual arts known for both his groundbreaking documentaries and feature films (Angels and Insects, 1995), returns to the visual arts with an ambitious new project. Paired projections reveal the social and aesthetic context of Annibale Carracci’s late 16th-century painting The Butcher’s Shop now in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum. One screen shows the perspective of the artist eyeing the butchers, and the other that of his subjects, who jocularly interact with the painter and the bustling world around him. Haas evokes the chiaroscuro of the period’s aesthetics and the formal precision of the painter’s work while giving us clues to the social context of Carracci’s age.
Curated by Noah Cowan and Francisco Alvarez, presented in partnership with Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute of Contemporary Culture, The Spirit House, main floor, ROM 100 Queen’s Park. September 4 through 13, from Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Friday from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Hindu mass iconography – those eye-poppingly colourful representations of Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh and their cohorts – are the subject of Canadian filmmaker Srinivas Krishna’s first major public installation When the Gods Came Down to Earth. Krishna’s gods come alive on large-scale projection screens dynamically interacting with the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Uutilizing actors and computer-generated animation, each god engages in their own characteristic activity, based on the iconic poses captured in the cards, stickers and posters that populate South Asian shops and homes around the world. Krishna’s playful, almost campy images are at once a kind of Indian pop art and brazen rethinks of ancient sacred concepts. As in his provocative films (including Masala, 1991 he questions how artists might confront the sanctities of Hindu and South Asian cultural experience and the European “multicultural” response.
Curated by Noah Cowan and Francisco Alvarez, presented by the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Culture in association with Future Projections, Royal Ontario Museum Bloor Street Plaza, 100 Queen’s Park. September 4 through 13, presented day and night throughout the Festival.
Painter Margaux Williamson uses Shakespeare’s Hamlet to explore the conflicts, confusions and contradictions of her downtown Toronto peers in her first feature-length video project. An installation consisting of film stills, screen tests, paintings and a screening create what Williamson calls a “weird parallel universe to mainstream cinema” in the very neighbourhood where Teenager Hamlet 2006 was shot. Williamson’s project and her simulation of the traditional commercial movie experience pose compelling questions. Curated by Steve Gravestock, presented by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in association with Future Projections. Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, 1082 Queen Street West. September 4 through 13, daily from noon to 5 p.m., nightly screenings in the Gallery at 7:30 p.m. from September 5 – 10. Admission is free, but space is limited; to reserve, email intern@januaryfilms.ca or call 647-723-6477. Opening September 5 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Italian-born Canadian artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla (Demolition Man, 1993) turns his attention to one of Toronto’s landmarks in his newest single-channel video work. Cathedral was filmed in the Toronto Eaton Centre during the height of the Christmas season as crowds of consumers circulate in a bright, shiny world of glittering surfaces with all the paraphernalia of the season on display. Brambilla’s looping kaleidoscopic landscape, influenced by early studies in time and motion, is at once dizzying and hypnotic.
Curated by Mia Nielsen and Piers Handling, presented in partnership with the Drake Hotel. Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen Street West. September 4 through 13, open daily. 24 hours a day.
Samuel Chow’s installation I’m Feeling Lucky presents an interconnected web of moving-image narrative paths in a constant flow of internet-derived imagery. Alluding to Google’s pervasive search button, Chow’s “random path network” mirrors our daily surfing experiences. Multi-layered moving-images interweave and collide into a seamless vibrant visual mash-up as Chow remixes and constructs a network of possibilities composed of found online videos, images and sounds from his own surfing expeditions. Our experience as voyeurs leads us into a random environment where anything can happen. Chow’s project highlights the nature of contemporary cinematic experience as heterogeneous, subjective and individually determined.
Curated by Kathleen Mullen, presented by Craig Scott Gallery in association with Future Projections. Craig Scott Gallery, 95 Berkeley Street. September 3 through 27 from Wednesday to Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Opening September 3 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Multidisciplinary artist Clive Holden presents two new installments in his ongoing project that gives the audience a prominent role in defining “utopia”. Ken Dryden presents a randomly generated matrix of visuals drawn from archival material to create an “avant garde biography” of an iconic hockey player and politician. We literally never view Ken Dryden the same way twice, and must come to a personal understanding of the identity we wish to create for this public figure. You Are Being Remembered juxtaposes personal Super 8 landscapes with high-definition satellite surveillance images on two simultaneous cinemascope screens creating a micromacro dichotomy and leading us to question when and where Utopia might exist.
Curated by Alex Rogalski, presented by CAMERA/Stephen Bulger Gallery in association with Future Projections. Camera, 1028 Queen Street West. September 5 through 13. September 5 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., September 6 and 7 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., September 8 through 13 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., Opening on September 6 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Future Projections is supported by the Hal Jackman Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council
Bell Lightbox
Bell Lightbox is soon to be the world's leading destination for film lovers, and a major cultural institution on the Canadian and international landscape. A five-storey podium building located on Reitman Square in the heart of Toronto’s downtown entertainment district, Bell Lightbox is designed by world-renowned Toronto-based architectural firm KPMB. The building includes five cinemas, two galleries, three learning studios, and an enhanced film reference library and archive. Bell Lightbox programming will give context to films through innovative cross-media exhibitions, lectures, new technology showcases and film-related learning opportunities for all ages.
The campaign to build Bell Lightbox is generously supported by founding sponsor Bell. The Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario each have contributed $25 million to realize Bell Lightbox. A gift of more than $22 million has been confirmed from the Reitman family – acclaimed filmmaker Ivan Reitman and his sisters Agi Mandel and Susan Michaels – and The Daniels Corporation, who together form the King and John Festival Corporation. The project is also supported by RBC as Major Sponsor and Official Bank, Visa†, Copyright Collective of Canada, NBC Universal Canada, The Allan Slaight Family, The Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation, CIBC, and many other individuals and corporations. The Board of Directors, staff and many generous individuals have also contributed to the campaign. The total amount raised to date is $147 million, three quarters of the total campaign of $196 million. For more information on the Bell Lightbox campaign, visit belllightbox.ca
We are a charitable, not-for-profit, cultural organization whose mission is to transform the way people see the world through film. Our vision is to lead the world in creative and cultural discovery through the moving image.
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