The Stories That Tell Stories
Featuring works by Kerri Flannigan, Qiaoer Jin, Henry Heng Lu, Sophie Sabet, Xuan Ye, with a commissioned text by Marina Fathalla

24 August – 22 September, 2018
Opening reception: Friday, August 24, 6-8PM

The Stories That Tell Stories presents Trinity Square Video’s 2018 Themed Commissions, which were produced over summer residencies.

The Stories That Tell Stories considers the various relationships we create between images and objects, and the systems that determine how these relationships figure on the backdrop of shared history. The exhibition looks at narrative broadly as a systemic tool for shaping politics and society, forming structures of oppression, nation building, and rhetoric that challenges the two. The Stories That Tell Stories explores alternative approaches to visualizing realities, making efforts to anatomize our collective consciousness while underlining the characters and systems that shape storylines.

CONTRIBUTORS BIOGRAPHIES

Marina Fathalla is an independent artist and writer based in Toronto. Her research projects are fueled by a particular sensitivity to site, at the intersection of its poetics and its politics. Motivated by her position within the Egyptian diaspora in Canada, her research looks to history of land through, and in the margins of museological presentation. She holds a MFA from OCAD University and an Architecture degree from Wentworth Institute of Technology. She has published essays and reviews in Kapsula Magazine, C Magazine, with Y+ Contemporary, and Forest City Gallery. She is a board member at South Asian Visual Arts Centre and a collective member of MICE Magazine. Her work has been shown at Xpace Cultural Centre, Whippersnapper Gallery and Younger Than Beyonce Gallery (YTB).

Kerri Flannigan is interdisciplinary artist currently based in Lekwungen and W̱ SÁNEĆ Territories who explores methods of experimental narrative and documentary. Primarily working in installation, video and performance, Flannigan’s work comprises an interdisciplinary approach to forms of experimental narrative and documentary. This work frequently takes a collaborative form, working individually and collectively within a large group to create responses. Family mythologies, coming-of-age confessions, and body language and have all been subjects of recent works. Flannigan’s work centers relational experiences of place, and is informed by the teachings of queer/trans methodologies and praxis. Flannigan has shown locally and internationally, receiving a Canada Arts Media Grant in 2017, BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant in 2017, and Best English Zine at the Expozine Awards (2011 and 2014) and was runner-up to the inaugural Lind Prize (2016).

Qiaoer Jin is a Chinese-born Toronto-based artist who recently graduated from the University of Toronto Visual Studies program. Jin primarily works with time-based media such as video and sound installation. The works express her interests in the natural landscape and the psychological correlation between nature and human being. Recently, Jin experiments with fictional storytelling regarding the topic of posthumanism.

Henry Heng Lu (盧恆) is a Toronto-based artist and curator. Lu primarily works with video, photography, and performance to investigate often overlooked narratives surrounding cultural identities and inequalities during the 21st century, in terms of values, doubt, insecurity, and vulnerability. He is co-founder and curator of Call Again, a Toronto-based initiative/collective committed to creating space for contemporary diasporic artistic practices and to expanding the notion of Asian art in the context of North America and beyond, through exhibitions, screenings, and roundtables. He holds a Master of Visual Studies from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

Sophie Sabet is an emerging media artist working predominantly in video. As an Iranian-born woman raised in Canada, her work focuses on exploring identity and the influences of the diasporic experience within the domestic sphere. She holds a BA in Art History from Queens University, and a MFA in Documentary Media Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

Xuan Ye (b.1989, Maelstrom) is the prototype of many objects, one of which is a.pureapparat.us. Lauded as “one of Canada’s most exciting voices in textual soma” by OBEY Convention Music & Arts Society, X is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and researcher whose body of work synthesizes research-creations of music, visual arts, and performing arts. X recently completed an MFA degree in Visual Arts from York University and obtained an MA in Media and Cultural Studies at New York University in 2013. X has had works exhibited and performed internationally, at venues including Goethe-Institut (CHN), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (US), Trinity Square Video (CA), the Wrong Biennale (URL), AGYU (CA), Times Museum (CHN), Bronx Art Space (US), Galleri CC (SE), among others.

The Stories That Tell Stories is generously supported by the EQ Bank.

+ image credit: Xuan Ye, Coda, The Spectacle Before Us Was Indeed Sublime, 2018.