In Describing relationships, Rhythm is Important
In Describing Relationships, Rhythm is Important
Screening and artist’s talk by Nika Khanjani
Curated by cheyanne turions
Wednesday September 21, 2016
7-9pm
421 Ridout Street N
Lecture Theatre
This event is free and accessible.
LOMAA is pleased to host the second of our curated programs as part of our Visiting Artist series. For this event we welcome curator cheyanne turions (Toronto ON) to present the work of moving image artist Nika Khanjani (Montreal QC). In addition to the screening, Khanjani will be working with Reclaim Honour, a community engagement project shaped by young Muslim women and men to promote healthy dialogue, awareness and collaborative action on gender-based violence, to host a workshop on identity and digital storytelling.
In Describing Relationships, Rhythm is Important
There are many forms that the experiences of our lives take in becoming history. There is the spoken story, told and retold. There are the written narratives, perhaps first as intimate letters, then later as biography. There are still images, collected and passed on, a sliver of time come to stand in for an occasion. And there are moving images, catching the specific choreography that each of us embody as we move through the world. Just as these media can act as documentation, they are also the tools of revivification, the means by which histories can come to live again, extending the reach of a person’s story through time.
In Describing Relationships, Rhythm is Important focuses on the work of Montréal-based moving image artist Nika Khanjani. Produced over the course of nearly a decade, these works present portraits of her relations—to her father, her mother, her brother, her daughter and to her home—exploring how distance can be a measure of place, as much as it can be a measure of intimacy. Khanjani herself does not appear in these works. Instead, she engages with the different material traces that make up her personal history in a process of sense making, tracing around her own identity as a daughter, a sister, a mother, here and now.
The program’s title evokes a line from essayist and memoirist Anaïs Nin’s diaries. Khanjani quotes the same line in the epigraph of one of the showcased works, drawing attention to the experience of relying on others in seeking balance through the mundane or spectacular obstacles of the present.
Montréal Spring Shrouded in Mist (2012), HD, 3 minutes
Iran to Texas: Major Scale Minor Movement (2012), S16mm, HD, DV, 19 minutes
Current (2007), 16mm, 8 minutes
Free World Pens (2015), HD, 21 minutes
Untitled sketches (2015–2016), HD, iPhone footage, 10 minutes
The screening will be followed by an artist’s talk by Nika Khanjani.
NIKA KHANJANI is a film and video artist, writer and educator. Her work is marked by contrasting extremes and a patient sense of beauty. She combines landscape photography, subtle sound design, and portraiture to invoke internal states responsive to political and historical forces, as well as intimate relationships. She is based in Montréal.
http://nikakhanjani.com/
CHEYANNE TURIONS is an independent curator and writer currently based in Toronto. Her work approaches the space of exhibition as alive—the gallery or cinema is a space of dialogue where the propositions of artists come into contact with publics, questioning ways of seeing and being in relation. She is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) and the Artistic Director at Trinity Square Video.
https://cheyanneturions.wordpress.com/
Reclaim Honour is an engagement and awareness project funded by Status of Women Canada that works to promote honour and prevent violence against girls and women through the support of the community.
http://www.mrcssi.com/#about_us
LOMAA is an emerging, enthusiastic and devoted non-profit artist-run collective that fosters collaboration, investigation and innovation by tapping into the talent and serving the needs of media artists in the London region.
LOMAA would like to thank Canada Council for the Arts for their continued support of the Visiting Artist Program.