South Asian Visual Art Centre (SAVAC)
© Rice Hunger Sorrow, 2021. Photo credit: Paribartana Mohanty
Experimental Film + Video at articule
July 14, 2023 at 7 PM EST
MONITOR 15 - Clearings in the Fog
Curated by Faraz Anoushahpour
Featuring short films by Mani Mazinani, Ali Satri Efendi, Abeer Khan, Nimisha Srivastava, Nada El-Omari, and Paribartana Mohanty
MONITOR is committed to the presentation of experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas.
articule is pleased to collaborate with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) to present the 15th edition of its experimental film and video program, MONITOR. Since 2005, MONITOR has initiated dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas.
In Clearings in the Fog, artists turn to their landscapes and bodies for resonance, reverberation, and echo. Through various forms and narrative structures, each film creates modulating relations that animate insides and outsides, subjects and objects, forms of sensing and sounding with worlds folding and unfolding. Sound and listening become central, guiding forces through the shifting temporalities of each piece as well as the program as a whole. In searching for clearings, we arrive at gestures that bring attention to acts of hearing, tensions between the audible and inaudible, and what slips in and out of visual inscription and forms of witnessing.
Artists
Nada El-Omari
Abeer Khan
Ali Satri Efendi
Nimisha Srivastava
Mani Mazinani
Paribartana Mohanty
Curator
Faraz Anoushahpour
SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to increasing the visibility of culturally diverse artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development and creating a community for our artists. SAVAC was founded to be an organization staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour.
Faraz Anoushahpour is an artist and film programmer. He worked at Images Festival (2014-2018), and is a member of the Reassemblage Collective in Toronto. His collaborative projects have been presented at e-flux Screening Room, Flaherty Seminar, Anthology Film Archives, Berlinale, ICA, MoMA, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and others internationally
Mani Mazinani (b.1984, Tehran) is a Tkaronto-based artist making installation, video, film, sculpture, photographs, multiples, sound and music. His practice evolved from an early interest in sound recording, now working with the process of translating thoughts and transferring concentration through work that thinks about scale and perception, combining subject matter and medium.
Saw Bells
Mani Mazinani, 11 min, 2022, Iran/Canada
Circular saw blades are played through two microphones: a stationary figure-of-8 pattern microphone (just below the video frame) and a mobile cardioid-pattern microphone suspended above the blades. This system is played as an instrument, one hand striking the saw bells with a mallet and the other manipulating the position of the suspended microphone. As it moves, so do our ears, revealing the available variation in the aural space. Within Saw Bells, motion is tied to our sight and hearing. The improvised playing/recording foregrounds our experience of our perception.
Ali Satri Efendi is an educator who loves films, books, music & running. He writes short stories, poems and various articles. He often makes films alone with simple technique and tools. His works have been screened at ARKIPEL: Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Minikino Bali, Images Forum, Festival Film Dokumenter.
Gelombang Longitudinal
Ali Satri Efendi, 5 min, 2016, Indonesia
The journey into the parallel medium where the compression and rarefaction coincide with each other. The traveling wave directs the journey to find balance within constructive interference.
Abeer Khan is a Mumbai-based filmmaker and photographer with a passion for storytelling that transcends traditional mediums. With years of experience in photography and a deep fascination with cinema, Abeer has perfected the art of blending these two passions to create compelling visual narratives that challenge the boundaries of the human experience.
Child-lock
Abeer Khan, 2 min, 2020, India
Produced in Covid-19 lockdown, the video surfs the freedom of mind, as the video’s tagline goes, ‘The mind wanders only if you let it.’ Child-lock is the safety lock usually found on appliances. Here, Child-Lock takes the literal meaning and interlaces it with surrealism. Not particularly for the body but for the mind, it is an expression which can travel from the past into the future, just like our childhood days spent in humid afternoons creating various scenarios and projecting them on walls.
Nimisha Srivastava Srivastava’s films and art reflect intersectional feminist themes and human rights issues. She has been involved with various projects that deal with the personal and political in evocative and avant-garde ways. Her poetry makes up for a large personal archive and she has been a choreographer and performer of both poetry and dance, often together.
Chadariya
Nimisha Srivastava, 25 min, 2022, India
Chadariya is an emotional sense-scape of abortion. It unearths pain and violence lived by young unmarried Indian women. Somewhere in the middle of the narrative lies a mother sharing her own lonely experiences with pregnancy, who eventually sings her heart out about the fabric that is life itself. The film comes out of the need to be heard. It includes multiple narratives and is rooted in research about the cultural and societal hold over women’s bodies and its representation as well. The film situates the viewer inside the deeply personal yet shared world of an unsafe abortion, taking the aid of music, songs, and beauty to communicate this experience.
Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal, Quebec. She has centered her practice and research interests on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement and the stories of belonging and identity through a poetic, hybrid lens.
from where to where نيول نيو نم d’où vers où
Nada El-Omari, 8 min, 2022, Canada/Palestine/Egypt
In the pieces I store and carry along my many different roads, my dialects may be signs of bruises but reclaimed they form the skin and voice I live in. Experiences of the where, from where, to where; a narrative amongst others. And as the words finally trickle through the needles, fingers seeping with tints trace the outline of whirling fields where I hang a jasmine branch on suspended necks and in the in-betweens, language soothes, swans mend, and the daily brings calm. We are the comfort of our multiples.
Paribartana Mohanty is a visual artist and storyteller based in Delhi. His work explores new environment-disaster-landscapes emerging near the coast of the Bay of Bengal in Odisha, that study the deep impacts of recurring cyclones, tsunamis, and land erosion on marginal communities, nature, and culture.
Rice Hunger Sorrow
Paribartana Mohanty, 20 min, 2021, India
Commissioned by VH AWARD of Hyundai Motor Group
Since the 1999 Super Cyclone, the state of Odisha is facing a surge of recurring cyclones, tsunamis, rising ocean levels and land erosion, rapidly changing its geopolitics, demographics, and culture. The video Rice Hunger Sorrow is a brief account of my visit, encounters and intervention— performance in specific post environmental disaster sites which are evolving near the coast of Bay of Bengal. The work speculates on new technological mediations and approaches initiated by new policies that are shaping public perception and opinions about climate change today.