Part of Winter 2012
Pleasure Dome and the Rhubarb Festival, Canada’s premiere experimental performance festival, are pleased to co-present the video works of award-winning director, producer and writer James Diamond. Diamond will speak with artist, activist and curator Ananya Ohri following the screening.
The concrete, material object of the body, his own body, plays a central role in Diamond’s work. Since 1999 Diamond has been producing work motivated by the corporeal experiences of pregnancy, post-partum depression, sexual disorientation, as well as moments of rage and reflection, colonization and patriarchy. Self-described as being of Indigenous (Cree/Métis) and Jewish descent, a trans person and a self-expressionist, Diamond does not single out any one way to be identified. He offers himself as a whole: “mixed blood, mixed gender…mixed sex.” Letting us in at moments of personal reflection, Diamond’s work provides a glimpse into the changes he experiences as the triumvirate of a person, an artist and a political being.
James Diamond is a director, producer, writer and mentor in the fields of communications and multimedia. He has directed numerous award-winning films, including Mars Womb-Man which won the Best Experimental Work at imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in 2006. James is currently working as an editor, counting among his clients renowned institutes such as the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian.
The programme will include his body of work produced over the past decade including:
The Man From Venus (1999), First Things First (2001), Brain Plus World (2002), X (2004), Mars Womb-Man (2006), Private Property (2007) and I am the art scene starring Woman Polanski (2010).
Ananya Ohri is an artist, curator and activist who recently graduated with a Master of Arts from the Cinema and Media Studies program at York University. Her work explores the relationship between media and community. She currently works for the Regent Park Film Festival in Toronto. Ohri’s essay on the work of James Diamond, Stepping Between Projections, was produced during her Vtape Fellowship in 2010–¬11, a program that ran concurrently with the Curatorial Incubator v.8. The fellowship provided three emerging curator/writers support for their research and professional editing for their essay on the artist of their choice. The completed 2010-11 Vtape Fellowship Essays are published online at www.vtape.org.
