Continuous Journey

Ali Kazimi
CANADA/INDIA

Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings

Bo WANG, PAN Lu
CHINA/HONG KONG

The Excerpts

Curated by Call Again (Henry Heng Lu, Weibin Wang, and Winnie Wu)

“The Excerpts” investigates prejudice, power, and segregation through historical events. The program juxtaposes two films informed by the history and aftermath of British colonization and its ideological grounds, negotiated by the human condition. As dominance stems from a fear for “the abject”, those regarded as “the unknown” are often confined to a liminal space that is under constant discriminatory scrutiny.

Hong Kong-based artists Bo WANG and PAN Lu’s two-channel video, Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings, links racial dynamics in Southern China to the living conditions of citizens and environmental analysis directly channeled through imperialism. The work incorporates paintings, archival photographs, vérité footage, and film clips to compose a chronicle of botany, disease, trades and imperial expansion, projecting an excerpt of the history of British-ruled Hong Kong shaped by colonization, as well as orientalism. The ever-present exoticization of The so-called Orient through the Western gaze, in turn, draws attention to the human and non-human entities of stereotypes, especially one specifically interpreted based on climate.

Toronto-based filmmaker Ali Kazimi’s film, Continuous Journey, recalls the infamous Komagata Maru incident in 1914, an explicit denial of rights and exclusion of South Asians that led to a two-month detention of 376 passengers and an 11-hour negotiation to send them back. The film title comes from the little-known Canadian immigration policy in 1908, the “Continuous Journey Regulation,” which kept Indians out of the country until 1948. A tale of disappointment, struggle, hope, and uncertainty, the film ultimately complicates and contests the ideas of homeland and nationhood, intentionally overshadowing the continuing searches for home.

Both films point to the British Empire’s affront to those it colonized, or supposedly British subjects, highlighting the disjointed realities divided among race, bodies, and space, and subsequently, the very systematic exclusion fuelled by White supremacy.

Rather than merely taking the form of storytelling to shed light on cruel facts, “The Excerpts” illustrates the discontents against institutionalized power and the subject positions that carry far-reaching significance to the modern-day discourse on racial politics.

— Call Again

Curated by
Ali Kazimi, Bo WANG, PAN Lu
Date / Time
July 12, 2022
11:00AM – 11:00PM EDT

(ARTISTS)

Ali Kazimi, Bo WANG, PAN Lu
Presented With:
CSV logo

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.