Imminent Future
About
Location: VIVO Media Arts Centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver.
Dates: February 10 – 11, 2011.
Programmers Am Johal, Cecily Nicholson, Nicholas Perrin and Althea Thauberger considered community and aesthetic responses to narratives of inevitablility, and privilege vis a vis imagining any future through intersections of cultural production, theory and activism.
Other progams situated in conversation with Imminent Future were No Reading After the Internet: Selections from the short stories and parables of Franz Kafka and 602,000: WORKS ON HOUSING: Urban Subjects Residency and Emergent Exhibition.
2011 Web Presence
Imminent Future
February 19 2011 12pm-1am by donation 0-$15
Programmed by Am Johal, Cecily Nicholson, Nicholas Perrin and Althea Thauberger
info.imminentfuture@gmail.com
If we no longer hold assumptions about The End of History, “progress,” or the legitimacy of an avant-garde, then the question must be posed: Who are we? What is the worth of the poet in a society that already knows better than itself? Who can and who can’t imagine a future? What is so terrible about the Terror? Where’s the comedy in apocalypse? Imminent Future is organized to bring together performers, speakers and participants from different backgrounds for a sustained discussion and dance party. You are warmly invited.
12pm-3pm
Hegel seminar withJoshua D. Goldstein (U of C)
Dancing with the Rose: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, terrorism, revolution, and finding satisfaction in the present world *registration for this seminar by email <info.imminentfuture@gmail.com> is recommended; suggested readings provided upon request
4pm-5:30pm
A Series of Short Lectures
Jerry Zaslove, Warming Up Frozen Time: In Defense of Benjamin’s “Aura”
Fiona Jeffries, Fear’s Refractions
Tania Willard, Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Cuture
6pm-7pm
Songs for a Better Future performance by Matei Bejenaru (RO) with DB Boyko and the VOICE OVER mind Choir *note this performance is presented by the Western Front 303 E 8th Ave Vancouver
8pm-9pm
Charles Demers hosts Populist Myths of Inevitability Video Cabaret
9pm-1am
An Evening of Revolutionary Music with DJ PunDit, the real featuring the unreal & Christie Lee Charles
Imminent Future
Candice Hopkins Curatorial Lecture on Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years + Videos from the exhibition: Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy and Bedevil, Maria Thereza Alves Iracema (de Questembert)
Thursday February 10 2010 7pm by donation 0-15$
Programmed by Am Johal, Cecily Nicholson, Althea Thauberger, Nicholas Perrin
info.imminentfuture@gmail.com
Image: Iracema (de Questembert), Maria Thereza Alves, 2009.
Candice Hopkins is the Elizabeth Simonfay Curatorial Resident, Indigenous Art, at the National Gallery of Canada and is the former director and curator of the exhibitions program at the Western Front in Vancouver. She has a MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, New York, where she was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for the exhibition Every Stone Tells a Story: The Performance Work of David Hammons and Jimmie Durham (2004). Her writing has been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, New York University, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, and Banff Centre Press, National Museum of the American Indian among others.
Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years
The world is at a crossroads in many ways. Now is the moment to reconfigure our notions of time to reveal alternative ways of thinking and being for the future. In Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years Indigenous artists imagine the future within the context of present experiences and past histories. By radically reconsidering encounter narratives between native and non-native people, Indigenous prophecies, possible utopias and apocalypses, this exhibition proposes intriguing possibilities for the next 500 years. “We all in different measure have carved out the future,” observes Hopi photographer and filmmaker Victor Masayesva in his book Husk of Time. “We are all clairvoyants, soothsayers, prophets, knowingly assuming our predictions.”
Featuring work by: KC Adams, Maria Thereza Alves, Shuvinai Ashoona, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Michael Belmore, Rebecca Belmore, Colleen Cutschall, Wally Dion, Jimmie Durham, Rosalie Favell, Jeffrey Gibson, Brett Graham, Faye HeavyShield, Marja Helander, Jonathan Jones, Brian Jungen, James Luna, Kavavaow Mannomee, Tracey Moffatt, Kent Monkman, Reuben Paterson, Archer Pechawis, Edward Poitras, Postcommodity, Pudlo Pudlat, Lisa Reihana, Paul Anders Simma, Doug Smarch Jr., Skawennati, Christian Thompson, Marie Watt, Linus Woods, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
Presented by the Winnipeg Cultural Capital of Canada 2010. Organized by Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art with the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Urban Shaman: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and partnering organizations. Curated by Candice Hopkins, Steve Loft, Lee-Ann Martin and Jenny Western.
+
Tracey Moffattis an Australian photographer and filmmaker. Her work reflects her views on Aboriginality and the misconceptions about and representations of her people in art and cinema. Her earliest photographic work, a series of black-and-white portraits of members of the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Company, was entitled Some Lads (1986), and was a subtly subversive take on the 19th-century ethnographic photograph. Using a documentary style, Moffatt often draws on images from film and television made during her youth in the 1960s and 1970s as an adopted half-Aboriginal child in a white family. She carefully stages images to reflect familiar tableaux, but with a twist.
Bedevil, Tracey Moffatt | 1993. 35mm/DVD, 90mins. Australia
Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Tracey Moffatt has constructed a sublime trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past and bewitched by memories. All three stories are set in Moffatt’s highly stylized, hyper-real, hyper-imaginary Australian landscape. Courtesy of Women Make Movies, New York
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, Tracey Moffatt | 1990. 35mm/DVD, 19mins. Australia
On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint. Courtesy of Women Make Movies, New York
Maria Thereza Alves a Brazilian artist living in Europe, researches social and cultural phenomena working particularly with situations which question social circumstances about what we think we know and who we think we are and look instead at where and how we actually are at this time. Alves has recently exhibited in the Guangzhou Triennal, Manifesta in Trento, the Prague Biennial, the Athens Biennal and the Lyon Biennal where she received the Francophonie prize.
Iracema (de Questembert), Maria Thereza Alves | 2009. Video, 27mins. Brazil/France
In her docudrama Iracema (de Questembert), Maria Thereza Alves recounts the ambiguous story of Iracema, a young woman from the isolated Brazilian village of Corubime. Iracema makes the long journey from São Paulo to France, where she learns that she has just inherited her father’s estate. She is now the owner of a vast property which the local authorities would like to buy from her rather than see it in the hands of a “savage”.
___________________
Imminent Future Series: If we no longer hold assumptions about The End of History, “progress,” or the legitimacy of an avant-garde, then the question must be posed: Who are we? What is the worth of the poet in a society that already knows better than itself? Who and who can’t imagine a future? What is so terrible about the Terror? Where’s the comedy in apocalypse? Imminent Future is organized to bring together performers, speakers and participants from different backgrounds for a sustained discussion and dance party. You are warmly invited.