Tuesday, April 16, 2024
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Lananh Chu
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-Presented with Tangled Arts + Disability.
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This is an audio described screening.
In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s feature-length film Oriana, a band of feminist militants takes refuge in a lush Puerto Rican landscape. The film relocates Monique Wittig’s infamous novel Les Guérillères to the island in the wake of the more recent Hurricane Maria, where its protagonists work and cook, dance and rest, and prepare for battle amidst an abundant tropics.
Suffused with inexplicable encounters, Oriana unfolds across forests, caves, rivers, and the ruins of industry and colonial infrastructure. Encompassing both delirious choreographic interludes and attention to quiet rituals, the film contains a world of perceptual distortions, obscure gestures, and collective processes.
Lananh Chu’s Creases of Time is visually composed of points of obfuscation, glitches, and blips resulting from unsteady hands attempting to take panoramic photos. In this one-minute video, the filmmaker presents the audience with folds and flutters that might otherwise be discarded.
Together, Oriana and Creases of Time strive to visualize the ecstatic and unsettling potential of new forms, languages, and futures.
List of Works
Creases of Time, Lananh Chu, 2023 | USA | Video | 1 minute | No Dialogue
Made by recycling old photos and postcards as well as repurposing the panorama technique that is a form of photography in time, Creases of Time connects different aesthetics and modalities of representing time. The animation belongs to a series of videos in which I explore the use of “improper” media to make moving images.
Oriana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, 2022 |Puerto Rico | Video | 78 minutes | Spanish with English subtitles.
The film relocates Monique Wittig’s feminist classic novel Les Guérillères (1969) to contemporary Puerto Rico, whose cycles of colonial extraction and regeneration have long been a focus of the artist’s short films.
About the Artists
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico whose expanded moving image practice is entangled with Boalian theatre, expanded cinema, and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors and improvisation. Her recent focus is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, everyday poetic thought, and feminist experiments. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Pivô in São Paulo and Argos in Brussels, the 34th São Paulo Biennial and Momenta Biennale in Montreal.
Lananh Chu is a Vietnamese writer and maker. They are calling for a ceasefire and unwaveringly supporting the Palestinian liberation.
Jaclyn Quaresma 