Free Screening

Over the last 30 years, Canadian video artist Gary Kibbins has created a unique body of work that unpacks commonly held notions to underline the absurd in the everyday.

Unfolding with wry humour and precision, his videos explore both sense-making and, more importantly, non-sense in a form that is at once philosophically dense and visually lush.

This programme features a half-dozen new Kibbins videos that question language, meaning and belief. Microscopic gestures get close examination: e.g., one narrator loses his balance while paying too close attention to his movements through a threshold, another analyzes the repressed psychosexual traumas that undulate through a late-night house party.

At the same time, larger meanings are questioned: the video God Hates Himself finds the ardently atheist Kibbins recording the testimony of a witness and victim of Congolese civil-war atrocities who still declares a faith in God.

Kibbins lets this declaration of belief stand, but juxtaposes it with a more solipsistic story of the unfolding of a typical North American life — yet again undercutting the tools which we use to try and make sense of our place in the world.