Brett Kashmere in Toronto and Buffalo this weekend

From: Carolyn Tennant (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Feb 21 2008 - 09:08:18 PST


Dear you:
Media artist and curator Brett Kashmere will present his work at Hallwalls
in Buffalo, NY this Saturday evening at 8pm - the details of the screening
are below and made it on the list. But he'll also be north of the border
tomorrow night when he presents a program of videos in Toronto for V-Tape's
Curatorial Incubator v.5: Video Animation - What's Up Doc?
Yours Truly, Carolyn

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Friday, Feb. 22, 6-8pm @ VTAPE
401 Richmond St., #452 / Toronto, Ontario
Curated by Brett KASHMERE, for Vtape's Curatorial Incubator v.5: Video
Animation - What's Up Doc?
6pm: Reception and 7pm: Curator's Talk and Premiere Screening
Videos by: Stephen ANDREWS Tony COKES Jacqueline GOSS PAPER Rad Jenny PERLIN
Steve REINKE

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Saturday, Feb. 23 8pm
"We Do Not Remember, We Rewrite History"
An Evening with Brett Kashmere
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo NY

Through intricate experimental documentaries and unadorned camera movies,
the Canadian filmmaker Brett Kashmere explores the intersection of history
and (counter-) memory, geographies of identity, and the politics of
representation. His work, which has screened internationally at the London
Film Festival, Made in Video: International Video Art Festival in
Copenhagen, New York's Anthology Film Archives, the Kassel Documentary
Festival in Germany, and The Images Festival in Toronto, combines
traditional research methods with hybrid interfaces, handmade equipment, and
materialist aesthetics. His most recently completed film-essay, Valery's
Ankle, explores the spectacle of hockey violence in North American media.
The film scholar Thomas Waugh writes that Valery's Ankle "may well give
momentum (and integrity) to the discourses of sports, masculinity, and
nationalism in Canadian cinemas."

Valery's Ankle (2006,33 minutes, digital video, color)
In September 1972 Canadian hockey pros faced the amateur Soviets for the
first time ever. Canada's victory in this famous Cold War showdown, thanks
to a last-minute winning goal, has become the most celebrated Canadian story
of all time. But the games were also marked by extreme acts of violence that
are only subconsciously remembered. Team Canada's performance throughout the
series and Bobby Clarke's two-handed slash of rival Russian star Valery
Kharlamov's ankle, in particular, signal a "glitch" in the production of
Canadian nationalism, identity, and masculinity. This fracture disrupts
Canadian self-identification as polite, peaceful and sportsmanlike and
enacts a shadow identity as frustrated, aggressive and vengeful.
"This rumination on hockey and violence is an essay film in the best, most
Markerian sense of the term: personal, contemplative, and dense, its tightly
focused topic opens nonetheless onto a broad field of inquiry." (Sean
Rogers, Broken Pencil)

Preceded by:
unfinished passages (2005,17 minutes, digital video, b&w)
Archival images and a contraflow of texts trace the migration of the
filmmaker's great-grandfather from London to the Canadian prairies. Using
the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory,
unfinished passages reframes his forced immigration / orphan experience
through the developing lens of cinema.
"Small monument to my great-grandfather, prairie homesteader and giver of
consciousness. Internalized history lesson for the birth of a province - in
honour of 100 years since Saskatchewan's named independence - and light
reflection on cinema's unreeling history, conterminously." (BK)

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER:
Brett Kashmere grew up playing hockey on the Canadian prairies. Both a
filmmaker and educator, he writes extensively about avant-garde cinema,
documentary, music and video art, curates international exhibitions, and
teaches experimental film. Kashmere has presented screenings and organized
exhibitions at festivals and venues such as the Seoul Film Festival, Musée
d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, France, the D.U.M.B.O. Arts
Festival in Brooklyn, Cinematheque Ontario, New York's Eyebeam Center for
Art and Technology, Portland's Cinema Project, Light Cone in Paris, V Tape
in Toronto, and La Cinematheque québecoise. In 2004 he organized the touring
expanded cinema installation and DVD-format catalog, Industrie: Oeuvres
récentes de Richard Kerr. He recently curated the retrospective, Arthur
Lipsett: About Time, which traveled throughout France. Kashmere's writing
has appeared in journals and magazines such as The Canadian Journal of Film
Studies, ESSE arts et opinions, Take One, PROTEÉ revue internationale de
theories et de pratiques semiotiques, Senses of Cinema, Synoptique, and
Offscreen, and anthologies like The Films of Jack Chambers, The Encyclopedia
of the Documentary Film, and the forthcoming volume, Excesses and Extremes
in Film and Video. Kashmere holds an MA in Film Studies and an MFA in Studio
Arts from Concordia University in Montréal. He is currently a Visiting
Assistant Professor at Oberlin College in Ohio.

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PS: GO SABRES!

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