The Living Room
For Centre A’s first experiential project “The Living Room” in 2022, the gallery space is transformed into a furnished living room space. Visitors have the opportunity to sit down in the makeshift living room to watch a series of curated films and videos.
By converting the gallery rooms into a (semi-)domestic space, Centre A hopes to demystify and challenge the oftentimes inaccessible, highly curatorial nature of a contemporary art gallery. Through this project, the gallery hopes to host a space in which visitors can reconnect with each other after almost two years of isolation.
There are two series of films programmed as part of The Living Room project: The first one, addressing reconnection, lineage, and exile, takes place from February to March 2022, and the second series will run from April to May 2022.
The second series is built upon an examination of Canada’s role in the Multicultural discourses in terms of inequality, intermediacy, and extraction. Bringing together an array of approaches, through documentary or futuristic lens, this program points to the making of a nationhood and its discontents from a sociopolitical perspective.
Visit Centre A's website for details of the films.
Program
Ho Tam – The Yellow Pages (1994), 07:40 minutes, B&W tinted, English text, silent
Ho Tam was born in Hong Kong and educated in Toronto, Canada, and has worked in advertising firms and community psychiatric facilities before turning to art. He works in a diverse mix of disciplines including painting, video, print and public art and has exhibited in various cities across North America. His first video, The Yellow Pages, was commissioned by the public arts group Public Access for an installation/projection at Union Station in Toronto, 1994/95. Tam currently lives in New York City and is working on a few new projects, including a video on a famous Chinese movie star from the 40s.
Arranged alphabetically in 26 brief segments, The Yellow Pages explores the history of immigration and its implications within the North American social context. Adapted from a bookwork of the same title, images and text are interwoven to examine the Asian experience under the mass media and everyday life. In a playful and satirical manner, the video brings the audience to review our ongoing history, from the Chinese railroad labourers in Canada, the Japanese in W.W.II, the U.S. involvement in the Korean War, to the arrival of the “Boat People” and the 1997 Hong Kong Money Crisis.
Roy Dib – Mondial 2010 (2010), 19:17 minutes, colour, Arabic with English subtitles
Roy Dib is a visual artist and filmmaker that works and lives in Beirut, Lebanon. Dib received a master’s degree in Theatre and Performance Studies from the Lebanese University in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2004. His practice is rooted in film, video and video installation with a focus on the subjective constructs of space and how they put forth issues from the Middle East’s geopolitical context. In his work, territory, memory, and imagination come together with his experiences in Lebanon, creating new horizons for interaction with otherness.
Mondial 2010 centres on a Lebanese gay couple as they take a road trip to Ramallah. Dib uses video as an apparatus to transgress boundaries, making Mondial 2010 a travel film in a trajectory that doesn’t allow travel, starring two male lovers, in a setting where homosexuality is a punishable felony.
Cherie Valentina Stocken – The Weave (2006), 05:36 minutes, colour, English/Blackfoot
Cherie Valentina Stocken is from the Cree/Ojibway Nations. She is also English, French, and German. Stocken’s video/performance work deals with issues of cultural convergence and the individual identity. She has received her BFA from the University of British Columbia and has screened both nationally and internationally. Some venues include imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival (Toronto), Images Festival (Toronto), Dreamspeakers International Aboriginal Film and Television Festival (Edmonton) and NURTUREART Non Profit Inc. (New York).
This video/performance triptych addresses the issue of cultural convergences and the individual identity. A woman of mixed descent stands between both the English and Native cultures searching for a resolution to bring these two groups together. She carries with her, the struggles of both ancestral cultures. These nations’ behaviour negatively affects the young woman as she cries out with anguish. She is their future generation, dealing with the residue of colonialism. In time, the two ethnic groups learn to understand and respect one another. The girl learns to weave both cultures together while finding balance in herself. Her spirit can now rest.
Thirza Cuthand – Medicine Bundle (2020), 09:33 minutes, colour, English
Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 they have been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo, Hot Docs in Toronto, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany where their short Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement won honourable mention. Their work has also been screened at galleries including the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg.
“Medicine Bundle is about a bundle that was used in my family to heal my Great Great Grandfather from a smallpox epidemic and a life-threatening wound from a gatling gun used against him during the Battle Of Cutknife Hill in 1885. The bundle was again used in 1918 when my Grandfather contracted the Spanish Flu as a baby. It was buried in an unmarked grave to protect it from grave robbers, but the spirit within the bundle has continued to protect our family from more modern psychological effects of colonization like depression. As I finished this video, a pandemic was raging over the globe, and I wondered if the bundle would continue to protect us now as it has in the past.”
Richard Fung – Nang by Nang (2018), 40:18 minutes, colour, English
Richard Fung is a Toronto-based videomaker and writer. His tapes, which explore the intersection of race, sexuality and representation, have been widely screened and collected internationally, and his essays on cultural policy and politics have been published in many journals and anthologies. Richard frequently programs film and video, and has served on the boards and committees of many organizations.
Nang has lived outside the box. Born in a Trinidadian village in 1934, she grew up poor, illegitimate, mixed-race and female, but she survived by defying convention. She left the first of five husbands when he cheated on her. With no formal training, she danced with choreographer Geoffrey Holder, who later won Tony Awards for The Wiz. In her twenties, she went to work in the Orinoco delta in Venezuela, and saved enough to buy a house. She started university in New York in her 40s. Stubbornness, resourcefulness, and resilience have allowed Nang to surmount life’s scars and tragedies. In this vivid portrait, filmmaker Richard Fung gets to know his previously unknown first cousin at her current home in New Mexico and on the road in Trinidad.