Feelings

Curated by:

Maria Alejandrina Coates

Featuring Artworks by:

Nelly Csar Mexico

soJin Chun Toronto

Ximena Cuevas Mexico

Gabriela Golder Argentina

Christian Jankowski Germany

This exhibition proposes to examine the element of feeling and emotion in media art as a means to disrupt the homogenous and immersive space of the mediatic and virtual realms. The artists in the exhibition negotiate the dynamics between emotional affect, and its portrayal through the sterility and distance of media art.

Historically, the subject of embodiment, or the transition of the human body from a physical to a virtual space, has taken centre-stage to media artists' concerns. In Latin America and its diaspora, media and performance artists have featured the body precisely due to its precarity amidst geo-political and social violence. However, this exhibition attempts to move beyond the discussion of embodiment to include the dimension of psychology and the spectrum of emotions such as anger, love, hate, resentment, admiration, and devotion as a politicized state of being that is activated through media. In the context of aluCine, and filmmaking as a genre, this exhibition will also explore the formal tropes and stereotypes of the Latin-American dramatic character.

All artists in this exhibition use video and performance to disturb embedded social cues for conveying emotion, and reorganize the senses in ways that allow for a multiplicity of subjectivities and inter-textual relationships to emerge.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

NELLY CSAR. is a Mexican artist living between Mexico City, Puebla and Vancouver. She explores misbehaviours, perversions and love through durational performance, sculpture, drawing, installation and art-writing. Her work has been shown in Mexico, Canada, Argentina, Hungary,

France and the U.S. and has been featured in the Museo de Mujeres Artistas Mexicanas MUMA and Archiva: Masterpieces of Mexican Feminist Art. . Completed MFA studies at The University of British Columbia and a Licenciatura en Artes Plsticas from Universidad de las Amricas, Puebla. Co-founder and creative director of Pandeo: The multi-social venue for affective health, in Mx City.

SOJIN CHUN is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, video and installation. Chuns experience living in the Korean diaspora in Bolivia and Canada influences her work, which looks at the idiosyncratic moments of everyday life in its inconclusive and contradictory nature.

Through artist residencies in Serbia, Bolivia, Brazil and Taiwan, Chun has developed a personal style of storytelling using humour to reveal complex social issues. Chun has participated in video screening and exhibitions in Bolivia, Brazil, France, Sweden, Germany, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan and the U.S. soJin exhibited at the Bienal de Artes Visuales de Santa Cruz The Biennale of Visual Arts in Santa Cruz, Bolivia at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Museum of Contemporary Arts; she received one of the Top Ten awards for the best projects in the biennale. In November of 2013, Chun had a solo exhibition at Tragaluz Digital in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain as part of Fotonoviembre, a Biennale photography festival. Chuns video works are represented by GIV Montreal, and V-Tape Toronto. She is also part of the Artist Pension Trust, a global collection of contemporary art.

Chun has a B.A. in Applied Arts from Ryerson University and a Masters in Communications and Culture from Ryerson/York Universities. Community-based pedagogy is also part of her art practice, as she programs and teaches educational workshops to youth, and adults. She is currently the Head of Education and Community Outreach at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, Canada.

XIMENA CUEVAS is obsessed with the micro movements of daily life, with the border between truth and fiction, with the "impossibility" of reality. Her work relentlessly seeks out the layers of lies covering the everyday representations of reality and systematically explores the fictions of national identity and gender. It redefines the meaning of documentary.

Her videos have been shown in festivals such the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Berlin, and Montreal, and she was the featured artist at "Video Viewpoints" in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been an invited speaker at numerous events, including those sponsored by the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Guggenheim in New York, and most recently at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Among the many grants she has received are those from the FONCA Mexican National Endowment for Culture and the Arts, the Eastman Kodak Worldwide Independent Filmmaker Production Grant, and Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Lampiada grants. She toured Dormimundo, a documentary about the discomfort of being, as the guest artist of the Central New York Programmers Group fall tour of 2000.

GABRIELA GOLDER is a Visual artist, curator and professor of Video and New Technologies in Argentina and abroad. She is the co-director of the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento BIM and CONTINENTE, Research Center in Audiovisual Arts, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, in Argentina. Since the beginning of 2013, she is the Guest curator of the Experimental Video and Film Program of the Modern Art Museum, in Buenos Aires.

She works on film, video and installations. Her works mainly raise issues of memory, identity and the world of labour.

She was artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada; the CICV,France; the Kunsthochschule fr Medien, Germany; SchlossBalmoral, Germany; Wexner Center for the Arts, United States; UQAM, Montral, Canada, Chambre Blanche, Qubec, Canada, RBHA, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Le 104, Paris, France.

She received several awards for her work, among others: BA Site Specific 2014; National Fund for the Arts group projects, Argentina; Luis Espinal-Mostra CineTrabalho Award, Brazil 2011; the "Sigwart Blum Award of the Argentinean Arts Critics Association, Argentina 2007; Media Art Award from the ZKM, Germany 2004; the first prize of the Saln Nacional de Artes Visuales, Argentina 2004; the first prize at Videobrasil, Brazil 2003; the first prize at Festival Videoformes, France 2003 and the Tokyo Video Award, in Japan 2002.

Her recent exhibitions includes: Territorios de desastre, EAC, Montevideo, Uruguay 2015; Multitude, Sao Paulo, Brazil 2014 ; The progress trap, DEAF2014, Rotterdam 2014; Ensayos iluminados, MUNTREF, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2014; Entre tiempos... La Coleccin Jozami en el Museo Lzaro Galdiano, Madrid, Spain 2014; Panoramas do Sul, Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil 2013 ; Monitoring, Kassel, Germany 2013; Women Commentators, Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland 2013; In the Country of Last Things, Video installation of Gabriela Golder and Charly Nijensohn, Museo de Arte Contemporneo de Lima, Per 2013; Conversation Piece, Casa Museo Jos Carlos Maritegui, Lima, Per 2013; Recorridos, Sala Cronopios, Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2012 Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland 2012; Care Crisis, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Praga, Repblica Checa 2012; Contar historias : Microrrelatos en las colecciones nacionales de arte, Casa del Bicentenario, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2011;10th Sharjah Bienal; Time Behind the Vision, Praxis International, Miami, United States 2011; Radical Shift. Politische und soziale Umbrche in der Kunst Argentiniens seit den 60er Jahren, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany 2011; On ne se moque pas de la

mort, Le 104, Paris, France 2010; La Llotgeta, Valencia, Spain 2010; Tales of Resistance and Change, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany 2010; Inconsciente ptico, Galera 713, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2010; Mujeres. 1810-2010, Casa del Bicentenario, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2010; X Bienal de la Habana, Cuba 2009; Arrorr, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria 2009; Kunst direkt, Mainz, Germany 2009; Tragicomedia, Sevilla, Espaa 2009; Reocupacin, Museo Caraffa, Crdoba, Argentina 2008.

CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg Germany and is currently based in Berlin. In his artistic actions and media artworks, he makes use of film, video, and photography, but also painting, sculpture, and installation. Jankowskis work consists of performative interactions between himself and non-art professionals, between contemporary art and the so-called world outside of art. During the course of his artistic career, Jankowski has collaborated with magicians, politicians, news anchors, and members of the Vatican, to name just a few. Jankowski registers these performative collaborations using the mass media formats in which he stages his workfilm, photography, television, newspapers. This procedure lends his work its populist appeal. Jankowskis work can be seen both as a reflection, deconstruction, and a critique of a society based on spectacle. In his view, art has turned into a spectacle, and as a result, has undermined its critical potential.