Houariyates

Laïla Mestari
CANADA

Red Film

Sara Cwynar
CANADA

Birdsaver Report Volume 2

Heehyun Choi
USA/SOUTH KOREA

I Can Hear My Echo

This brief program will screen four times on the hour from 5:00PM - 9:00PM.

Please click "Get Tickets" above and select your prefered showtime when checking out.

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. www.moma.org/collection/works/314418

Video at www.ubu.com/film/serra_boomerang.html

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? 

— This program is part of the suite ok to rest curated by Jaclyn Quaresma.

Curated by
Heehyun Choi, Sara Cwynar, Laïla Mestari
♿
Date / Time
June 23, 2022
5:00PM – 9:00PM EDT

(ARTISTS)

Laïla Mestari, Sara Cwynar, Heehyun Choi
Presented With:

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all. 

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us. 

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.