Antimatter [Media Art]

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Saturday, October 24th, 2015

Internationally acclaimed media art festival Antimatter opens this October 16, with an exciting complement of film and video screenings, expanded cinema performances and public art installations. The 18th edition of Antimatter [media art] will allow Victoria audiences to experience over 150 film and video works from 30 countries for free or nominal charge. Screenings comprise award-winning short films, thought-provoking features and innovative media hybrids, the majority World or Canadian premieres and all new to Vancouver Island.
 
As part of their performance series, Antimatter brings Berlin-based Japanese duo usaginingen to Victoria for the world premiere of their new work Pendulum, which represents their first time performing in North America. A compound word meaning “rabbit man” in Japanese, usaginingen travel the world with their unique and magical brand of expanded cinematic performance. A hybrid of mad invention and shamanic animism, usaginingen have invented the prototype analogue instruments they perform with: TA-CO, which generates imagery, includes a camera, an animation table with layers, rotating drum, water-basins, coloured ink, beads, and mirrored prisms  while SHIBAKI comprises a percussion kit connected to a MIDI controller and a stringed instrument. Additional performances on the last weekend of the festival include Je Ne Sais Plus, a 9 x 16mm projector work by American artist Kristin Reeves; Holland, MAN by Winnipeg-based Aaron Zeghers, who presents a multi-projector film about the dissolution of his family farm with live sound and image manipulation; and Post-Film, a program of hand-made 16mm expanded cinema by Scott Fitzpatrick, also from Winnipeg.

Feature films include Paul Sharits by Montreal-based filmmaker Francoise Miron, a long overdue documentary on the work, influence, life and mysterious death of legendary experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits. The film uses never before seen archives of all types and out takes, rare interviews with people in the avant-garde scene and experimental cinema historians. Long after his premature death, the impact of Sharits lingers on. Miron’s documentary not only offers a great recapitulation of one of the most idiosyncratic and pertinent oeuvres within avant-garde film history. He also sketches the portrait of a tormented, deeply romantic artist, always courting disaster but also cursed by an inherited mental condition. The reconstruction of a tragic career is animated with ample illustrations combined with home movies and other rarely seen archival materials. SoCal auteurs the Betschart Bros present the world premiere of their accomplished genre-confounding first feature Before She Leaves Her Body wherein two sisters live life, party, then die. As their souls travel through Purgatory in search of each other they tap into "the signal"—a relentless patch of aggressive short wave radio, punk rock and VHS images. Their existence continues on after death due to the recordings they made in life.

Screenings and performances are at Deluge Contemporary Art (636 Yates Street), which is also the venue for Emile Serri’s installation No Time for Tomorrow, an investigation and re-assemblage of the artist's Syrian heritage. Serri edits imagery culled from YouTube videos with amateur war footage and personal archival material—a sound excerpt taken from a 1986 home movie of her father recording a tape for a Mother’s Day gift and a recently recorded conversation in which he teaches her to count in Arabic. The countdown echoes the tripartite physical structure of the film and the time left before Syria’s disappearance. More public media installations from Germany, Turkey, Netherlands and Mexico can be viewed at Deluge and after dark in their transom window, as well as in the windows of Bernstein & Gold and the Legacy Art Gallery. MediaNet co-presents the world premiere of Hither Green—Victoria artist Brandon Pool’s three-channel installation—in their new Flux Media Art Gallery at 510 Fort St.

In addition to screenings, performances and installations, Antimatter hosts three media salons during the festival, informal and open forums where member of the public can engage with visiting and local artists.

Complete Antimatter program guide is available now throughout greater Victoria and online at http://www.antimatter.ws/