Upcoming

SCREENING: An evening with re:assemblage

re:assemblage presents a screening of two artists’ films dealing with issues of migration, immigration and displacement.

Saturday, June 9, 2018, 6 – 9 PM
Trinity Square Video

Presented by Trinity Square Video in conjunction with the exhibition BAD STARS by Christina Battle, co-presented with CONTACT Photography Festival.

LANDSCAPE FOR A PERSON / PAISAJE PARA UNA PERSONA
[Florencia Levy, Argentina, 2015, 8’, colour, video]
Landscape for a person traces a path through different locations into a sequence of images. Places as the backdrop for a story that slips from its possible representation, building an invisible layer of meaning between the image and the story. This video was constructed from material filmed on Google Street View and edited with audio interviews of people who were in conflict of transit or deportation. *Toronto Premiere Previous screenings: Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, Experimenta India, Festival Film Dokumenter (Yogyakarta, Indonesia)

RETURN TO BURMA / GUI LAI DE REN / 歸來的人
[Midi Z, Taiwan/Myanmar, 2011, 84′, colour, video, Chinese and Burmese with English subtitles] *still above
TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/40717812/
“After decades, Burma holds its first presidential election. Many Burmese living in foreign lands believe that changes will happen soon and it will move towards prosperity. So Xing-hong and Rong decide to return home. However, just a few days before departure during an overtime shift, Rong has an accident. With Rong’s ashes, Xing-hong returns home alone. When he arrives in Burma, Xing-hong finds out that his brother De is about to go to Malaysia to work. Many young people want to leave, but he has always wanted to stay in his hometown to do business. He begins asking around for possible business opportunities, but yet cannot decide which business to engage.

To Xing-hong, Burma seems unfamiliar and distant, because he has left Burma for too long. Consequently, at his own hometown or on a foreign soil, he always feels estranged as if abandoned by time and space. On a blackout night, the smuggling bazaar by the border between Burma and China, the motorcycles roaring into the faint daylight! Through the protagonist Xing-hong, we witness the changes Burma is going through and the true state of existence of its people.” – description by Midi Z.
*Toronto Premiere. Previous screenings: International Film Festival Rotterdam, Busan, Hong Kong, Locarno and Vancouver International Film Festivals.
Film courtesy Seashore Image Production

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BIOGRAPHIES

Florencia Levy is a visual artist based in Buenos Aires. Her practice is driven by long-term research that explores different forms of subjectivities in relation to history, intimacy, architecture and public space. Her work is often supported by anthropological fieldwork and interviews, focusing on community participation and the political resonance of places and objects related to conflict and affect. Her work crosses mediums ranging from site-specific installations, film and photography, to collaborative projects, painting, and publications that engage in specific situations in relation to history and memory. She has participated in artist-in-residence programs in institutions such as the POLIN Museum in Warsaw (2015), Sapporo AIR in Japan (2012), Gyeonggi Creation Center in South Korea (2010), Batiscafo Residency in Havana (2010), Taipei Artist Village (2009) and CentralTrak The University of Dallas at Texas Art Residency Program (2008). She has received numerous awards and fellowships including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015-2016). Her work has been shown at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, Arko Art Centre in Seoul; Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt; Museum of Contemporary Art in Tamaulipas, Mexico; National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago; Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre in Hong Kong, among others.

Born in Myanmar, Midi Z went to study in Taiwan at the age of sixteen and obtained a BA and an MFA in Design. Currently, he makes films in Taiwan, Myanmar and China.
Since 2011 Midi has made three feature films, each with a budget smaller than ten thousand US dollars. They include Return to Burma, which received the Hubert Bals Fund, The Poor Folk, which was in competition at the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes and Ice Poison, which won Best International Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival and represented Taiwan at the Foreign Language Oscars in 2014. In 2016, Midi’s latest feature, The Road to Mandalay, won Best Feature Film FEDEORA Award in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival and the Grand Prix at the Amien Film Festival. In addition to the features, Midi has made three documentaries to date. In 2016, his second documentary, City of Jade, which premiered at the Berlinale, was nominated for Best Documentary at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and won the Special Mention award at the 2017 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. In 2018, Midi’s third documentary, 14 Apples, premiered at the Berlinale.

The re:assemblage collective is committed to championing underrepresented voices and perspectives through public film/video screenings. We are itinerant and intentional. We are “reassembling” assumptions about artist film/video practices: who is shown and the forms of works championed. We are inspired by Trinh Minh-ha’s film ‘Reassemblage’. The re:assemblage collective is Christina Battle and Scott Miller Berry in Southern Ontario.
http://reassemblage.ca/
reassemblagecollective@gmail.com