This exhibition marks the first co-presentation between TSV and long-standing artist resource Vtape. As part of a curatorial development project, local emerging curator and artist Laura Paolini has organized an important historical exhibition on early forms of processed video images. The exhibition will occur at both TSV and Vtape.

This show opens a discussion of the paradoxes within this under-represented part of video art history. Working together, while remaining somewhat separate and outside the larger video art movement, and having close ties to experimental film as well as Fluxist and Dadaist art traditions, the work considered here is as subversive and potentially dark as it is precise or mathematical. Video art’s early history tends to read as collective or activist driven and often as borderline utopic, using narrative and limited in-camera editing to create compelling works. These tendencies did exist within image processing circles, but this exhibition focuses on magnetic tape and non-narrative projects, pushing an aesthetic and political agenda, using video and audio synthesizers, tube based monitors and magnets to change and manipulate the tape.

Featuring work by: Kim Blain, Peer Bode, Jean Pierre Boyer, Barbara Buckner, Eric Siegel, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Jane Wright, and Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video & Vtape

Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 22, 2 – 5pm

Master Class with Steve Reinke
Sunday, May 23, 2 – 4pm
$25 TSV Members / $30 non-members
Trinity Square Video and Inside Out are pleased to present the North American premiere of the collaborative, editing and re-editing project, Disambiguation by the renowned artists Steve Reinke and James Richards.  Working together remotely (Reinke in Chicago and Richards in London) with materials culled from each artist’s extensive, idiosyncratic archive of found and personally recorded documents, Disambiguation is a hypnotic and beautiful “mix-tape” produced by two master editors.  The artists’ joint process of selection and revision recalls underground, bootlegged audio compilations–here, recontextualized by the ubiquity of digital video.

Steve Reinke is a Chicago-based artist and writer best known for his videos.  His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival.  Reinke received the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2006.  In the 1990′s he produced The Hundred Videos (1996), an ambitious and highly influential video project, and a book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing was published by Coach House (Toronto). He has also co-edited several books, including By the Skin of Their Tongues: Artist Video Scripts (co-edited with Nelson Henricks, 1997), Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video (with Tom Taylor, 2000), and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman, 2005).  Reinke is associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

James Richards is an artist born in Wales (1983) and based in London. Richards has presented solo exhibitions at Tramway (Glasgow) and Swallow Street Gallery (London) and as part of the group shows Nought to Sixty at the ICA (London); Generational: Younger than Jesus at the New Museum (New York); and A Song For Those In Search Of What They Came With at Bellwether Gallery (New York). His single channel videos have been screened in curated programs at the Whitechapel Gallery (London), Light Industry (New York), and the Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne). Working as a curator, he has presented screenings at LUX (London), FormContent (London) and Light Industry (New York).

Please join us at TSV for a Master Class with Steve Reinke.  Through specific reference to his own celebrated works, Reinke will discuss the implications and possibilities of editing and animating with Adobe After Effects.

All are welcome, but enrollment is limited.

$25 TSV Members / $30 non-members

To register please contact TSV by phone or email: programming@trinitysquarevideo.com

Organised by: Trinity Square Video and Inside Out

The term “extra-territoriality” is a concept used to describe the state of exception of individuals and the (human) rights associated with citizenship to a region or land. Judiciously motivated by modern events, philosophic bio-political analysis has attempted to map the increasingly complex routes of sovereign power on the (bare) lives of individuals. But this mapping often foregoes an epilogue – all too often there is no afterward to describe the real existence of post-nation living and the reality of these lives as functioning, contemporary identities governed by dynamics historically enacted out of, and in spite of, the state of exception. Refugees and other extra-territorial persons, those who appear as the exception within an exception to the rule, are not some form of mythic, ironically liberated postmodern figures: the reality is that without citizenship, and the protection of the sovereignty that accompanies it, human rights can and will be violated and the democratic choices of the individual are annulled. Post-nation living, as vulnerable and volatile as it is, has created necessarily idiosyncratic processes of “citizenship” that are difficult to represent.

At the core of this issue is the ongoing question of whether or not right is necessarily associated with territory. The four works in this exhibition can all be organized and viewed in opposing pairs: the grounding in two physical places, Canada and Palestine; the perspective of the camera as an internal or external framing device; and the framework of discourse as a political analysis alongside a personal or allegorical one.

The mapping of this territory begins at the sea. In Sobhi al-Zobaidi’s about the sea we hear the conversations of young Palestinian men and women as they lament the ongoing loss of their homeland through military occupation. Against this conversation, al-Zobaidi films the crashing waves on the beach and the open sea, a potent symbol of the ever-diminishing landscape within which this population resides. Moving from the waves of the Mediterranean to the expanses of central Canada, is Leah Decter’s Imprint. Furthering this dialogue about location and migration, Decter’s video is composed of a series of actions performed in the landscape which signifies the unmarking and remarking of territory. Through these performances, a narrative of personal and national histories and memories converge.

Moving further westward, and shifting perspectives from interior to exterior, Jayce Salloum’s untitled part 4: terra incognita, looks at First Nations communities in and around Kelowna, BC. Interviewing various speakers of N’Syilx’cen (Okanagan), the video traces the history of European colonization in the region, and the tragic events to which their people were subject: biological warfare, residential schools, the reserve system, cultural decimation.

The exhibition closes with a return to Palestine in Ursula Biemann’s video essay X-Mission, an analysis of the Palestinian refugees camps as a zone of exception. Biemann’s ongoing practice in video has often been rooted in the investigation of borders, people, movement and nations, this video extending that conversation to the nationless, the extra-territorial. X-Mission explores this space through a legal, historical and symbolic engagement. The narrative, though focused on a Palestinian situation, frames the conversation on refugees within a broader diasporic context, questioning the idea of post-nationality.

Organised by: Ursula Biemann, Leah Decter, Jayce Salloum & Sobhi al-Zobaidi

ICON, VILLAIN, ANTIHERO

A trilogy of 15 commissioned works by 16 artists

including the compelling new works from

ANTIHERO
Trinity Square Video Themed Commission Program

New videos by Andrea Cooper, Kenneth Doren,
David Frankovich, Istvan Kantor and Tanya Read

ICON, VILLAIN, ANTIHERO Catalogue
Available for $5

Texts by Marusya Bociurkiw, Andrew James Paterson
and Mariko Tamaki, Illustrations by Willow Dawson

TSV’s Themed Commission Trilogy, ICON, VILLAIN, ANTIHERO, concludes with the premiere of five compelling new videos created in response to the idea of the illusive figure of the antihero, and the launch of a gorgeous 50-page catalogue that profiles the entire trilogy.

The works in the ANTIHERO program explore the complexities of contemporary narrative characterization: Andrea Cooper’s Tell Your Mother uses the haunting elisions of anachronism to study ambiguity in a “real” character; Kenneth Doren’s Crap Days negotiates a complicated exchange between the familial and the foreign by using various UK football chants to charming–and malicious–effect; David Frankovich’s Sweet Interlaced Transvestite reveals form as technological medium for the trans-mission of a message; Istvan Kantor’s Song of the Anti-Hero employs the artist’s renowned aplomb, wit and song to showcase the consumption–and replication–of the cinematic antihero; Tanya Read’s Mr. Nobodyfeatures the artist’s notorious animated character caught up in a never-ending digital desert.

TSV’s Themed Commission Program offers selected artists the opportunity to make completely new work at TSV with full access to the centre’s facilities for production, postproduction, education and dissemination.

The ICON, VILLAIN, ANTIHERO Catalogue celebrates the realization of this trilogy of Themed Commission Programs, a project which has provided sixteen fascinating videomakers–both emerging and established–the opportunity to explore ideas of persona, as inspired by classic characters in genre-fiction, often challenging deep-seated notions of screen-based performance and characterization through processes unique to artists’ video.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video