Friday, February 29th - 7pm

This evening's selection presents videos related to the idea of cultural hybridity, or more specifically, the inevitable creation of multiculturalism due to environmental changes, communication technology, and human migration. These works examine the beauty and challenges that arise when negotiating cultural differences and how the new global citizenship presents both opportunities as well as vulnerabilities, particularly in terms of racism and misunderstanding.

Goutam Kansar's poignant "I'm Leaving" reveals the distance that exists between immediate family members representing different generations and cultural backgrounds. With wit and insight, Richard Fung looks at the (mis)representation of minorities in Hollywood along with his personal heritage in his "Islands," and Manuael Saiz provides a brief and amusing video about "voice-overs" in movies. Vagner M. Whitehead's "World Music 2" is literally a hybrid musical composition, created out of audio loops identified as representing various musical styles from around the world. Sue Challis's "Reading Agatha Christie" provides humorous but also embarrassing encounters that reveal the ultimately futile hubris of British hegemony. Shelly Silver's "What I'm Looking For" presents a poetic search for connection amongst strangers via intimate secrets, accompanied by a melodic, soothing narrator, followed by Sagi Groner's "Jenin Journal," which examines the sense of dislocation and the desire to buffer oneself from the media and the atrocities of one's own country.

Both John Smith's "B & B" and Steve Reinke's "Amsterdam Camera Vacation" feature narrators visiting other countries and through stream of consciousness reveal the ironies of the tourism industry, and Reinke's case, the potentially amusing but troubling ignorance of world travelers. Marry Billyou and Annelisse Fifi's work presents the tragedy and effects of American fear and mistrust of foreigners, especially those of Middle Eastern descent, as an immigrant's life is destroyed by post 9/11 governmental surveillance and suspicion. Finally, in her "Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night" Sonali Gulati finds an unlikely connection to her native country of India by way of the flourishing telemarketing industry.

Program Three:
Hybridity: Dislocation, Separation, Change, and Fear

Shelly Silver: What I'm Looking For
Sagi Groner: Jenin Journal
John Smith: B & B, 6:00
Goutam Kansara: I'm Leaving
Mary Billyou & Annelisse Fifi: Mohamed Yousry: A Life Stands Still

Program Four:
Hybridity: Global Citizenship, Curiosity, and Confusion

Richard Fung: Islands
Sue Challis: Reading Agatha Christie
Steve Reinke: Amsterdam Camera Vacation
Manuael Saiz: Specialized Technicians: Being Luis Porcan
Sonali Gulati: Nalini By Day, Nancy By Night

Installation:
Vagner M. Whitehead: World Music 2

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Shelly Silver: What I'm Looking For
2004, USA, 15:00 Minutes

A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an Internet dating site she writes: "I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves..."

What I'm Looking For, a 15-minute high definition video, documents this adventure; the connections formed at this intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision. It is a short tale of desire and control.

Biography:
Quoting from the established genres of experimental, documentary, and fiction film and television, Shelly Silver's work is funny, poetic and formally beautiful, seducing the viewer into pondering such difficult issues as the cracks in our most common assumptions, the impossibility of a shared language, and the ambivalent and yet overwhelming need to belong - to a family, a nation, a gender, an ideology. Exploring the psychology of public and private space, the ambivalence inherent in familial and societal relations and the seduction and repulsion of voyeurism, Silver's work elicits equal amounts of pleasure and discomfort.

Text: VDB catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Sagi Groner: Jenin Journal
2005, Israel/The Netherlands, 8:10 Minutes

A personal deconstruction of a war document. A war experienced in exile through images from the news, a correspondence with home, and interviews with fellow ex-patriots. An intuitively collected stock of images, is compiled together a few years later, to reflect on mediated-memory.

Biography:
Sagi Groner was born in Rehovot, Israel in 1971. Groner works with film, video and moving images from the internet. This imagery is both source and end product of his work. Out of sampled footage of films, documentairies, and historic archival material, he searches, finds and shapes new images and storylines. These stories are often sociological or political in their content. His work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

John Smith: B & B
2005, UK, 6:00 Minutes

UK, November 26th, 2005 - The perception of an Anglo-American hotel room is colored by new revelations about "The War on Terror" and "The Special Relationship" that exists between Britain and the USA.

Hotel Diaries is an ongoing series of video recordings made in hotel rooms, all of which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events. Other works in the series include Frozen War (Ireland, 2001), Museum Piece (Germany, 2004), Throwing Stones (Switzerland, 2004), and Pyramids/Skunk (The Netherlands 2006/7).

Biography:
John Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. Since 1972 he has made over 40 film, video and installations works. His films have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world and awarded major prizes at film festivals in Leipzig, Oberhausen, Hamburg, Cork, Geneva, Palermo, Graz, Uppsala, Bangkok, Ann Arbor and Chicago. One-person presentations of his work include exhibitions at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), Pearl Gallery (London), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany) and retrospectives at the Venice Biennale and Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Regensburg and Winterthur international film festivals. John Smith is Professor of Fine Art at the University of East London.

Text: VDB catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Goutam Kansara: I'm Leaving
2005, USA, 5:00 Minutes

I am interested in the hierarchical shifts and role reversals that occur within a family as it members age and personalities evolve, as well as the resulting confusion of caretaking roles. My work frequently utilizes candid footage of my family, offering the viewer an intimate look into their private lives. Centering on our conversations, I highlight the changing roles we inherit and pass around during the course of the interaction. By turns harsh, caring, hilarious, and intolerant, we exhibit and inflict these power roles on each other. The foundation lies within the divergence of culture between three generations, as well as the fusion of humor and sentiment that permeates the pieces. Through this work the viewer is exposed to my family, and to our complex and fluctuating dynamic, bearing witness to our emotional exchanges, discussions, and arguments, largely an amalgamation of our generational and cultural dispersion from Bombay, London, Cupertino, and New York.

I'm Leaving revolves around the fusion of humor and sentiment as the viewer is confronted with my Grandfather's repeated perspective as he goes on and on, stating his displeasure, incredulity, and pain concerning my impending departure. Largely a result of my Grandfather's difficulty in hearing he is very much stuck in his own world, unwilling and unable to be reassured or cheered up, engulfed in a repetitive cycle of disbelief and indignation. Seemingly good intentions turn confused and irrational, and highlight the eccentricities of family.

Biography:
Gautam Kansara was born in London in 1979 and currently lives and works in New York City. He received a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2001 and an MA in Studio Art from New York University in 2004. Since 2002, Gautam has exhibited his work internationally in galleries, museums and festival screenings. In 2006 he was awarded a Fellowship from Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, a Swing Space award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and was selected for the Artist in the Marketplace program and exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Gautam has an upcoming solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut that will be on view in 2008. Gautam is a faculty member at Manhattan College's Department of Fine Arts.

Mary Billyou & Annelisse Fifi:
Mohamed Yousry: A Life Stands Still
2006, USA, 20:00 Minutes

Mohamed Yousry: A Life Stands Still is a short documentary about Mohamed Yousry, a naturalized American citizen who's life changed radically after September 11, 2001. Mohamed immigrated to the United States in 1980. For the next twenty years, he developed a full and happy life, as a husband, father, and academic. On September 13, 2001 Mohamed was approached by the FBI on his doorstep in Queens, NY. Currently, Mohamed is appealing his prison sentence and waiting to find out what his fate will bring.

Biography: Mary Billyou
Mary Billyou works professionally as a camera operator and assistant in the film and video industry. Mary brings this experience and knowledge to her own and her friends' art projects. Her films and videos have shown throughout the United States, the Czech Republic, and in China. The films she has shot have shown at the Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Tribeca Film Festivals, and at the CAA Conference. Some of her early videos are available on Miranda July's Joanie 4 Jackie compilations.

A studio graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's MFA program in film and video in 2002. Recently, she exhibited her first video installation at Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn, she co-curated the group show Future Yonder at Hudson Franklin Gallery, and she currently holds a media residency at Brooklyn Cable Access Television.

Text: VDB catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Richard Fung: Islands
2002, Canada, 8:45 Minutes

In Islands, Fung deconstructs the 1956 John Huston film Heaven Knows Mr. Allison to comment on the Caribbean's relationship to the cinematic image. A story of the unrequited love of a shipwrecked American marine (Robert Mitchum) for an Irish nun (Deborah Kerr), Heaven Knows Mr. Allison is set in 1944 in the Pacific, but was shot in 1956 in Tobago using Trinidadian Chinese extras to portray Japanese soldiers. The artist's Uncle Clive was one such extra, and Fung searches the film for traces of his presence.

Biography:
Richard Fung is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic whose work deals with the intersection of race and queer sexuality, and with issues of post-colonialism, diaspora, and family. His award-winning tapes, which include My Mother's Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Islands (2002), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and broadcast across North America. His essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including his famous "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn," in How Do I Look?, ed. Bad Object-Choices (1991). A former Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University and winner of the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art, he teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Text: VDB catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Sue Challis: Reading Agatha Christie
2007, UK, 6:00 Minutes

A group of Iraqi Kurds read in Arabic from one of the most widely translated novels in Iraq, "They Came to Baghdad" by Agatha Christie, while the British Director and Iraqi Cameraman intervene to arrange and rearrange their posture, volume and reading style; another waits to read. Struggling with the need to understand how "otherness" is created, the artist turned to her favourite genre - detective fiction - exploring the performative impact of small asides and casual assumptions which accrete to distance "us" from "them". In the making of the work shown, similar relationships form and are challenged by those involved.

Agatha Christie travelled and lived in Mesopotamia (Iraq) before and after World War Two with her archaelogist husband, and set several detective stories in the region. Her work, encapsulating a particular moment of colonial, upper class and racist discourse which still impacts on us today, is currently available as text and film all over the world. It is widely translated into Arabic and well read in the Middle East. It's claimed that she is the novelist second most requested by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

This work was made together with members of the Baran Kurdish Centre in Birmingham, UK, who gave their time and skills freely, uses the viewers' discomfort to provoke reflection on complex global relationships.

Biography:
Sue Challis is an emerging British video artist who has exhibited in Shropshire, Birmingham and London. Her work is informed by feminism, queer art and her own experience, exploring what the philosopher Alain Badiou describes as identity produced in situations - our responses linking us to further chains of events. Sue is based in the West Midlands and is currently working with young Polish economic migrants, making video set in an abandoned C19th North Wales squatters' village and a cling-film factory.

Steve Reinke: Amsterdam Camera Vacation
2001, Canada, 12:00 Minutes

"I'm not going to go to the Anne Frank House - I don't think I could take it - being a tourist is bad enough - though I'm not really a tourist - I'm here working - my camera's the one on vacation - taking holiday sounds and images - it's having a nice change of pace - for me it's still the same old thing - talking and talking. I don't want to go inside the Anne Frank House - I don't even know why they call it that - she didn't own it - as far as I know she didn't have any real estate holdings - not in this neighbourhood anyway, that's for sure - and I want to remember Shelly Winters as she was in A Place in the Sun - I don't care about the Oscar - I want to remember her tipping out of the boat - tippy canoe and beaver too - falling into the lake and drowning - I don't want to remember her any other way - except possibly her other sea-faring role, The Poseidon Adventure." - Steve Reinke

Biography:
Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his videos. His work is screened widely and is in several collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pompidou (Paris), and the National Gallery (Ottawa). His tapes typically have diaristic or collage formats, and his autobiographical voice-overs share his desires and pop culture appraisals with endearing wit.

Born in a village in northern Ontario, he is currently associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. In the 1990's he produced the ambitious omnibus The Hundred Videos (1996), and a book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing: Scripts 1997 - 2005 was published by Coach House (Toronto). He has also co-edited several books, including By the Skin of Their Tongues: Artist Video Scripts (co-edited with Nelson Henricks, 1997), Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video (with Tom Taylor, 2000), and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman, 2005).

Text: VDB catalogue: http:// www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Manuel Saiz: Specialized Technicians: Being Luis Porcan
2005, Spain, 1:30 Minutes

Manuel Saiz has done it! The Famous Hollywood Actor has once again gracefully accepted to be or not to be what he is. Witness the film that inspired the pun in the title of this short video - he is not afraid of a few digs at his person and status. He probably has a small army of agents, managers and assistants around him, to keep all those who are trying to make use of him because of his name at a distance. Perhaps Manuel Saiz was lucky, perhaps he knows the friends of the friends of - perhaps he has been waiting on the doorstep and hanging on the phone for months, driving the whole army crazy. He probably just used a sympathetic argument that struck the right cord: would the actor who likes role reversals for once lend his charismatic voice to a man who is used to doing precisely that? A man who always obligingly keeps out of sight, but who is, to the Spanish speaking part of the world population, the actor's mouthpiece, and therefore to a great extent "is him". "Being Luis Porcar" is part of the series "Specialized Technicians Required", and it makes you wonder who actually is the specialized technician in this construction. Is it the main character, the man who does the dubbing, or is it the artist himself, who nowadays has to master so many different skills in order to be able to carry out his profession properly? - Vinken & Van Kampen

Biography:
Manuel Saiz is a London based visual artist and independent curator. Since the middle eighties he has been showing sculptures, photographic prints and videos in art galleries and museums worldwide. Since 1995 he works mainly in video and video installations. His productions have been shown in many art film and video festivals, as Impakt (Utrecht), VideoLisboa (Lisbon), Videoex (Zurich), Int. Kurz Film Fest. (Hamburg), Transmediale (Berlin), etc. His video installations have been shown in commercial galleries and museums worldwide. Recent shows include Specialized Technicians Required at Moriarty Gallery (Madrid), Nominal Politics at T1+2 Space (London) and the group shows East End Academy at Whitechapel (London) and Save the Day at Kunstbuero (Vienna).

Text: Monte Video catalogue: http://www.montevideo.nl.
Reprinted with permission by Monte Video.

Sonali Gulati: Nalini By Day, Nancy By Night
2006, USA, 26:00 Minutes

Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night is a documentary on outsourcing of American jobs to India. Told from the perspective of an Indian living in the U.S., the film journeys into India's call centers, where telemarketers acquire American names and accents to service the telephone-support industry of the U.S. The film incorporates animation, live action, and archival footage to explore the complexities of globalization, capitalism, and identity.

Biography:
Sonali Gulati is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Photography & Film. She has an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Ms. Gulati has made several short films that have screened at over two hundred film festivals worldwide including Canada, United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. She has won awards and grants from foundations such as the Third Wave Foundation and the World Studio Foundation.

Vagner M. Whitehead: World Music 2
2006, USA, 15:00 Minutes (Loop)

World Music 2 contains an original soundtrack that was composed using royalty-free "world music" audio loops. Inserted into the shape of the male dancer are images found in Google Images searches for the terms "world", "music", "world music", and "music world". This work explores the paradoxical nature of consuming and being consumed by media culture. It also displays a representation of a world-wide collective unconscious, so to speak, a sort of snapshot of what people around the world, connected via the internet, considered world music to be in 2007. This video juxtaposes the arbitrary and inherently detached nature of popular computer applications with personal experiences and universal assumptions.

Biography:
Brazilian artist, educator and curator Vagner M. Whitehead works with time-based media. Vagner has exhibited his work throughout the United States (AZ, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MI, MN, NM, NY, OR, TX, VA, WI), abroad (Canada, India, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland) and online, in solo and group exhibitions and in video and film festivals. He earned a BFA (photography) from SCAD in 1995 and an MFA (creative photography and electronic inter-media) from the University of Florida in 2000. Vagner is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Oakland University, where he is developing its New Media specialization.