Mike Hoolboom – Ghost Stories
Mike Hoolboom – Ghost Stories
Presented in partnership with LondonFuse
Thursday May 26 / 8-10pm / LondonFuse – 211 King Street / FREE
LOMAA’s Visiting Artist Program is pleased to host influential Canadian video and filmmaker Mike Hoolboom to London ON. In collaboration with LondonFuse, Hoolboom will present a double-header screening, Ghost Stories, of new and recent moving images. The filmmaker will be present to introduce the program and answer questions following the works.
“Prolific and protean, Mike Hoolboom has produced over 80 films, ranging from experimental shorts to daring feature-length dramas. Often cinematically breathtaking, Hoolboom’s works are as visually inventive as Derek Jarman’s and as politically courageous as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s in their explorations of the troubling intersections of desire, the body, the world, and the nation-state in the chaotic, fearful late 20th century.” Tom McSorley, Canadian Film Institute
The two-part program will begin with Buffalo Death Mask, which won the International Film Critics (FIPRESCI) prize in 2013, as well as prizes in Belgrade, Croatia, Sicily and Ann Arbor. It is a hauntology shot on film, filled with the pain and pleasure of living in a body. Incident Reports is Mike’s newest movie, a feature-length city portrait/love story where each shot lasts exactly a minute.
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Buffalo Death Mask 23 minutes 2013
“For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question “Why are we still here when so many are gone?” Tom Waugh
Incident Reports 70 minutes 2016
“After a bike accident, the nameless amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a series of one-minute shots through the streets of Toronto. The result is an episodic love letter set against the city’s intimacies and haunts, populated by old and new acquaintances, while the disembodied voiceover weighs in on gender, animal, and the end of literary culture. Beginning from the position of the body in fugue, Incident Reports traces the most intimate of daily life changes through chronicling a back beat of the city’s endless transformation.” Amy Fung, Images Festival
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Mike Hoolboom. Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: experimentalist features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), film-to-video transcode: feature-length-found-footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: copyleft author 7 books, co/editor 12 books. Curator: 30 programs + www.fringeonline.ca Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 80 film/vids, most redacted. 10 features. 70 awards, 15 international retrospectives. 3 lifetime achievement awards. www.mikehoolboom.com
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LondonFUSE.ca is a new type of media publication that every city needs. We showcase and mentor London’s scene-builders and tastemakers. We work with emerging creative talent to produce high-quality, engaging content and events about cool bands, great beer, pioneering startups, alluring artists and more.
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LOMAA would like to thank Canada Council for the Arts for their continued support of the Visiting Artist Program.