AVAILABLE FOR FREE STREAMING OCTOBER 15 - 30, 2021

 

Timiga, Nunalu Sikulu (My body, the land and the ice), Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory,  (2017)


Video by: Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory.
Filmed and edited by: Jamie Griffiths.
Music by Chris Coleman and sung by Celina Kalluk.

 

 RPL Film Theatre Presents:

S.P.A.N.E 2021

Curated by Johannes Zits

 

DISCUSSION PANEL

A discussion about "S.P.A.N.E. 2021: LAND" program with curator Johannes Zits and artists Linda Duvall and Jay Kimball.



 

S.P.A.N.E 2021: LAND



For the videos in S.P.A.N.E. 2021: LAND, the artists place themselves in a landscape that they converse with. While some sites are readily understood, other conversations are challenging and at times, soul searching.  All of the videos are, fundamentally, personal engagements; responses to the sites where the artists have found themselves in. In each of these encounters the artists have found a way to foreground the land. We come from the earth. In one way or another, we are inextricably tied to it through the place we inhabit, the ground we walk on, and the foods we eat; and eventually we all return to the earth. Watching and listening to what the land has to say to us; observing its life forces, is a way of honouring and respecting this most fundamental of elements.  

Curator: Johannes Zits
 

We come from the earth. In one way or another, we are inextricably tied to it through the place we inhabit, the ground we walk on, and the foods we eat; and eventually we all return to the earth.
Green hand with red fingernails resting on brick ruins

Still image from With a finger to her lips..., Alana Bartol, 2021, Courtesy of the artist

 

Artist Bios


Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Her site-responsive works explore divination as a way of understanding across places, species, and bodies. Through collaborative and individual works, she creates relationships between the personal sphere and the landscape, particular to this time of ecological crisis. She is a member of Fathom Sounds, a collective of artists that have come together to think long-term about the health of water and the role artists play in responding to urgent ecological, political, and social issues that collect around water.

Ed Pien is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. He has been making art for over early 30 years. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, he immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of eleven.

Eve Tagny (b. 1986, Montreal) is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory — inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies. Weaving lens-based mediums, installation, text and performance, she explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency, in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality.  

Jay Kimball is a settler artist living on Treaty 4 Territory in Regina. He reflects on the roles of land and community in the handmade as he creates work that ranges between pragmatic objects, sculptural earthworks, and social practice. 

Kimball was raised on a farm near Rockglen, SK and studied at the University of Regina, eventually replacing the plow with a pencil and sports with art. That being said, he continues the values of labour, team work, and resourcefulness through his artistic practice. His work is found in collections at SK Arts, the Rooms (NL), and in private collections nationally and internationally.

In 2018, Kimball created Silt Studio, a social enterprise in Regina that celebrates ceramic excellence and invests in the creative practice of artists working in a variety of mediums. Over the last year, Kimball has embarked on a fresh trajectory, creating large, site-responsive installations using raw ceramic materials directly on the land. He is currently developing a new body of land-based earthworks.

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory or Laakkuluk, is a kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) performance artist, poet, actor, curator, storyteller and writer. She is known for performing uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance. She performs internationally, collaborates with other artists and is a fierce advocate for Inuit artists. Laakkuluk is a founding member and the Artistic Director of the Qaggiavuut Society of the Performing Arts, based in Iqaluit, Nunavut.  

Linda Duvall is a visual artist based on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan. Her work exists at the intersection of collaboration, performance and conversation. Her hybrid practice addresses recurring themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence. https://www.lindaduvall.ca/

Green hand with red fingernails resting on brick ruins

Still image from Walking with the trees, by Linda Duvall, 2020

 

ABOUT THE CURATOR


Johannes Zits

Toronto based artist Johannes Zits’ multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the many meanings engendered by a body, both human and non-human and extending the notion of the performer to include nature itself. Since graduating from York University in 1984, Zits has presented work across Canada and internationally, including performances for the 8th Encuentro, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2013); Le festival international du film sur l’art, Montreal(2013); and performance variations on the “Island”: M:ST Festival, Calgary; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Meta, Chongqing, China; and Havana, Cuba (2014-16). From 2011 to 2014 he facilitated an Intensive Performance Art Workshop at Artscape Gibraltar Point as well as curated the first editions of S.P.A.N.E., Screening of Performance Art in the Natural Environment. He was part of a curatorial team for Duration And Dialogue (2015 -17). In 2019 the Copenhagen Contemporary Museum commissioned Zits to realize a score for their permanent collection. In 2020 he performed at the International Biennial of Asuncion, Paraguay. He was the 2020 artist-in-residence at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario, where he presented the exhibition Listening To Trees and realized the 20-minute video, Checking In On An Old Copper Beech.

 

This program is presented by the Regina Public Libray Film Theatre.

RPL Film Theatre thanks the following organizations for their support in this programming:

     

This curated program is part of the VUCAVU Expanded project.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.​