Thursday, June 23, 2022
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5:00 pm, 6:00 pm, 7:00 pm, 8:00 pm.
This brief program will screen four times on the hour from 5:00PM – 9:00PM
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Laïla Mestari, Sara Cwynar, Heehyun Choi
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented with Art Museum at the University of Toronto and Toronto Arab Film Festival
Yes, I can hear my echo and the words are coming
back on… on top of me. The words are spilling out
of my head and then returning into my ear.
It puts a distance between the words and their
apprehension or their comprehension. The words
coming back seem slow. They don’t seem to have
the same forcefulness as when I speak them. I think
it’s also slowing me down. I think that it makes my
thinking slower. I have a double-take on myself. I
am once removed from myself. I am thinking and
hearing and filling up a vocal void. I find that I have
trouble making connections between thoughts…
—Nancy Holt and Richard Serra, Boomerang, 1974.
This in-person screening borrows its title from Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s 1974 video “Boomerang”, which Serra describes as “… a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized.” In this screening images are treated as joyful echoes, reverberations of both the image’s author, and the person who captured it.
The videos of which this screening is compiled are themselves compiled of collected images and sounds. Artists and filmmakers Heehyun Choi, Sara Cwynar, and Laïla Mestari consider contemporary image-capturing practices highlighting the joy, anxiety, and utility of limitless, unmediated, isolated yet interconnected access to images both online and AFK (away from the keyboard).
The title of the screening is taken from a moment in Heehyun Choi’s Birdsaver Report Volume 2 when Heehyun herself quotes Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s 1974 video Boomerang. In that video, Nancy attempts to speak aloud while her voice is recorded and played back to her through headphones. The slight lag—or glitch—in the loop’s timing mimics the wait during which a voice travels across a void to find a solid surface before returning as an echo to the speaker. Causing Nancy to slow down, recess, and speak carefully, these reflected sounds interrupt the action of speaking that caused them in the first place.
Taking the metaphor of the echo a step further: What might an echo be for a visual culture driven by images that become disassociated from their authors? Images that do not have a solid surface to reverberate from and be reflected upon, but are instead absorbed, consumed, and collected by the publics?
I Can Hear My Echo presents the work of Heeyun Choi, Sara Cwynar and Laíla Mestari, who consider the everyday image, the media used to capture it, and one’s own way of organizing and then sharing their personal collection or archive of images.
List of Works
Houariyates
Laïla Mestari
CANADA | 2021 | DIGITAL | 3 MIN | ENGLISH
I anchor my gaze in the eye of the camera. These women are
Houariyartes and their music awakens a memory within my blood. Now, my internal dance has irregular rhythms and strange postures.
It is situated in between homelands and defined by contradictory lines
of thought. My song is made of accumulated materials and images crashing against each other. Now, every element, once revealed, conceals another. I find myself entangled while unraveling the narrative threads of my past.
Red Film
Sara Cwynar
CANADA | 2018 | 16MM>DIGITAL | 13 MIN | ENGLISH
Sara Cwynar’s Red Film, continues the artist’s meditations on the
intersection of identity and capitalism. Cwynar quotes writers and philosophers as she pulls focus on the color-coding of mass production:
of cosmetics, shoes, and the red muscle car. Red Film critiques capital’s persuasive, constant stream of pressures on women to conform and
consume; it questions the effects of this torrent on the self; and it points to the use of “high art” to sell aspirational merchandise, as distilled in a
“Cézanne” branded jewelry box.
Birdsaver Report Volume 2
Heehyun Choi
CANADIAN PREMIERE | USA/SOUTH KOREA | 2021 | DIGITAL | 11 MIN | ENGLISH/KOREAN
Birds continue to collide onto glass walls, and humans collect, measure, and analyze to prevent it. Various attempts to observe, perceive
and represent the reality are prevalent in the history of art, film, and media. Do human vision and bird vision lie in the same world? Are we
able to see the same image as the other?
Jaclyn Quaresma 