Antimatter 2007

Media Installations

September 22 to October 6, 2007

in the main Deluge gallery

You Are Being Remembered

Clive Holden

Live cinema, surveillance as memory, the suspension of violence. You Are Being Remembered seeks both personal and universal truths: who stabbed Mr. Neil in the Mt. Work High School parking lot? Where was I at the time? Is there such a thing as an innocent white boy? Which is worse, virtual or physical violence?

You Are Being Remembered is a media diptych on flat screen TVs. Film, video, photographic and audio documentation of a variety of sites in the Greater Victoria area are juxtaposed with satellite images examining the same locations, along with international “targets of heavy surveillance” (the red poppy fields of Afghanistan, a car crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, the lineup for the Eiffel Tower, the Bangor, Washington, nuclear submarine base…).

The accompanying text is a fiction/essay hybrid. The character of “Conn” remembers seminal events of his childhood and teenage years on Vancouver Island, including acts of vandalism, and his expulsion from school in 1978 on the same day that the Vice Principal was stabbed. As an adult artist, Conn examines his childhood neighbourhood from above via new web-based tools such as Google Earth, and visits these same sites from his early history. The soundtrack, by Rotterdam-based composer Oscar Van Dillen, references the tradition of landscape in music.

Shown with Engines of Despair and MEAN, these are the first three works of Holden’s new project, Utopia Suite.

at fifty fifty arts collective

Aqui No Pasa Nada

Aquí No Pasa Nada is an exhibition of visual and sound documents that captures a specific time in the social-political conflict that erupted in Oaxaca on June 14th of last year and continues unabated today. At the end 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s army was dispatched to the state of Oaxaca sanctioned to use the highest level of military force to silence the state’s popular uprising, following a brutal and unprovoked attack on the state’s striking teachers. Forced to stand by and watch the imprisonment and death of their fellow Oaxaqueños from a position of relative impotence, artists took up creative arms to bear witness to their experiences, and the new reality of Oaxaca under siege. The work in this exhibition aims to both provoke the viewer aesthetically, as well as convey a sense of what occurred, and is occurring, in this remarkable and historically important city.

Internationally acclaimed photographer Antonio Turok uses an eye developed and refined over years of documenting his often volatile surroundings—most notably in Chiapas in the 1990s—to capture indelible images of a year of unrest, and the effects of increasing state-sanctioned violence.

Resistencia Visual, curated by Isabel Rojas, features the work of up-and-coming video artists working in Oaxaca (Bruno Varela, Mal de Ojo TV collective, Ana Santos, Carlos Franco, Héctor Ballesteros, Nadja Massun, Luna Marán, Juan Robles, Gabriela León, Lucero González, and Jill Friedburg of Seattle-based Corrugated Films) who took up the video camera in order to document their experiences and take a political stand against an oppressive government and egregious injustice. The images compiled for this exhibition represent only a fraction of the thousands of hours captured on video during this time.

For his part, internationally celebrated painter Demián Flores reclaims the public exercise of stencilling to create a unique graphic hybrid, distinctly Oaxacan in character. Inspired by the young street artists who graffitied Oaxaca with images of political resistance and informed by the state’s history, Flores employs the image of 19th century Mexican president and indigenous hero Benito Juárez to underscore the historical resonance of Oaxaca’s current situation.

Aqui No Pasa Nada will also feature sonic resistance in the form of transmissions emanating from Radio Planton, a pirate radio station essential to providing crucial information to the people of Oaxaca during times of crises. The soundtrack to this exhibition brings you songs of the barricade and testimonies to the terror.