Part of Winter 2000
Guest-curated by Catherine Elwes (In Person) & Maggie Warwick, London
Out of Bounds, Defining the Body has been programmed by Catherine Elwes and Maggie Warwick for the British/Canadian Video Exchange 2000, a series of trans-Atlantic video screenings taking part this winter. The curators have selected from close to 30 years of independent work represented at the Lux Centre for Film, Video and Digital Arts in London. This year, two themes have emerged. The first programme Jokes and Conceptual Conceits, will be presented as part of The Independents series at Cinematheque Ontario on Wednesday, March 29th, 6:30 pm, Jackman Hall, AGO (Free!).
The second programme features the enduring theme of the body and is titled Out of Bounds, Defining the Body. “Since the body first breathed its simulated breath on the screen, it has conjured up every aspect of the lives it represents. The filmic body operates in the anxious space between our mortality and the libidinous dreams of our desires. Jo Ann Kaplan and Franko B. take the body to the extremes of experience, to a state of abjection that frees it from the constraints of social convention. Sam Taylor Wood, Jayne Parker and Catherine Elwes show the body in all its poetry and power, the physical realities revealed as conduits to deeper desires and fears. The female body invaded by culture and by individual male aggressors is the theme of work by Louise Forshaw and Amanda Holiday, who share with Keith Piper a concern with the colonization of the black body by white culture. Cerith Wyn Evans shows us how the male body has been subjected to the same commercialization as its female counterpart. The male body under threat of AIDS is the theme of Neil Bartlett’s moving reply to his father’s anxieties about who would take care of him when he is sick or old. The body politic re-emerges in the work of Gorilla Tapes as they reassess the effect of American imperialism on the bodies of the third world. Death gets a more light-hearted treatment with Simon Pummell’s dancing skeletons, while Dryden Goodwin and Jo Pearson take a sensitive and compassionate view of illness. Harrison and Wood stand alone as the physical jokesters defying gravity, while Smith and Stewart’s performances to camera are poignant evocations of the explosive territory of heterosexual coupling.” (Catherine Elwes)
