Nuit Blanche in Montreal
Screening event
Saturday March 1st, 2014, 8 pm - 2 am
Photo credit: Jean-Paul Kelly, Service of the goods , 2013.
AN IMPRECISE REPETITION OF GESTURES
Within SBC Gallery’s Focus Program on Sovereignty, this screening considers the repercussions of positioning the self as the place of sovereign embodiment. Highlighting processes of interpretation, translation and mediation, these films consider the different ways the subject enters into relation with its social and cultural environment.
FILM SELECTION
Jean-Paul Kelly, Service of the goods, 2013.
Duration: 29:10
Service of the goods is comprised of selected scenes from American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s seminal documentaries on state-run, tax-funded institutions, including Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), Basic Training (1971), Juvenile Court (1973) and Welfare (1975). While creating shot-by-shot reproductions of each chosen scene, including accompanying subtitled dialogue, Wiseman’s representational strategy – his overall production and editing process – is, itself, evoked as an institution subject to the same means of observation and expression.
Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: three , 2013.
Duration: 38 min
Ricerche: three is the first of a number of works that will collect under the title: Ricerche. Ricerche: three, as an expanded (intentionally exaggerated in terms of scale) interview with 35 students at an all-women’s college in western Massachusetts, focuses down on a single site and collective situation. The interview unfolds on camera in such a way that you’re not entirely sure how many people are being interviewed as interviewees slowly add in with the camera, following Sharon Hayes as the interviewer, shifts across the group left to right.
A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE SOVEREIGN SELF OR SUBJECT
What is a sovereign self or a sovereign subject ? Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, SBC’s Assistant Curator, and cheyanne turions, Curator in Residence, invite you to participate in their exploration of what is at stake in thinking about sovereign embodiment from the perspective of the individual by sharing your comments below.
The objective behind this exchange is double: to render public the ideas that led to the selection of films for Nuit Blanche and to invite further analysis of this concept by inviting in other potential interlocutors.
This conversation will be bilingual as cheyanne turions is a unilingual anglophone while Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre is a francophone fluent in English. The boundaries of sovereignty can be explored through a consideration of what is both added and lost in these acts of translation.
