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January 1 to March 29, 2009
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Projections Series: Film and Video Program
Mariana Vassileva, ¡ Toro !, 2008 
Yuki Kawamura, In My Hand, 2008. 
Kelly Richardson, Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006. 
Takashi Ishida, Unasaka, 2007 Recent film and video output is rich and diverse. Many artists from a wide variety of backgrounds—video makers, visual artists, photographers, playwrights, choreographers and composers—are drawn to the poetic power of the image projected on the big screen. Projections also refers to the energy of a thrust forward, toward the future of the moving image.
Mariana Vassileva This image of a man mimicking a bullfighter’s gestures to fight back the ocean waves is taken from a work by Eastern European artist Mariana Vassileva. Born in 1964 in Tornovo, Bulgaria, Vassileva has lived and worked in Berlin since 1991. She attended that city’s Hochschule [et non Horchschule??] der Künste and, like many other film and video artists, first launched her work on the video festival circuit, before moving on to galleries and museums. She has been featured in solo exhibitions since 2000 in Germany and, more recently, in Bulgaria and Spain. In 2007, she took part in nearly twenty group shows, including Cine y Casi Cine at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía and Visões Berlinenses at the Paço das Artes in São Paulo, Brazil. This is the first Canadian presentation of her work. Mariana Vassileva looks at solitude as a phenomenon. Employing a minimalist approach, she creates works of remarkable poetic intensity. ¡ Toro ! was produced as an exclusive piece for Art.es magazine. A freeze frame made the cover of the February 2008 issue and, through a special initiative of art critic and curator Fernando Galán, the publisher and editor of Art.es, a DVD of the work was included with every copy of the magazine. The master copy of ¡ Toro ! is now part of the Art.es collection. ¡ Toro ! presents the solitary and senseless struggle of a man imitating a bullfighter’s movements. The man heads into the waves, using his suit coat as a cape to provoke the ocean into fighting. Transformed in the face of the unyielding force of the eternal rolling of the waves, these “classic” bullfighter’s gestures, dignified movements that are deeply ingrained in Spanish culture and inspire respect, also conjure up a world of illusions worthy of Don Quixote: an impossible ideal of honour, futile efforts to exert control and a refusal to acknowledge reality. The work becomes a metaphor for an attitude to the world and to life itself. ¡ Toro !, along with three other recent works by Mariana Vassileva, will be screened as part of the Projections series.
Takashi Ishida and Yuki Kawamura Takashi Ishida and Yuki Kawamura were both born in Japan, Kawamura in Kyoto in 1979 and Ishida in Tokyo in 1972. Both steeped in Japanese culture, they each nevertheless left home to pursue their commitment to art in another country. Ishida now lives and works in Toronto; Kawamura chose to complete his studies at the École supérieure des Études cinématographiques in Paris, where he still lives. Takashi Ishida began to paint at the age of fourteen, and his originality and artistic integrity were recognized at once. In 1995 he began to make films. He made his name with Gestalt, a 16-mm film shot in 1999 which he created by taking image-by-image photographs of his own paintings. He also used the traditional Japanese roller for painting, a method that enabled him to analyze the time required for the image. In 2001, he shot the 19-minute film Art of Fugue with the idea of transforming sound into image. Art of Fugue reveals his entirely personal way of understanding and analyzing music. Takashi Ishida has also been presenting live painting performances since 2001. After studying French at the Kyoto University of Languages, Yuki Kawamura continued his studies in film in Paris. A visual artist and filmmaker, Kawamura also creates performance art and is involved in the electronic music scene. Since 2005, while continuing to make numerous videos, he has produced three short films that demonstrate his interest in stories and in narrative film in general. His videos since then have become spaces of pure creation. Kawamura composes fleeting, floating images that mingle nature and dreams, elusive thoughts and poetry.
Kelly Richardson Kelly Richardson’s Exiles of the Shattered Star, recently acquired by the Musée, will be screened as a solo presentation. Exiles of the Shattered Star is a video lasting almost 30 minutes shown as an unending loop. In June 2006, Richardson filmed a sunrise in the Lake District, England, a region famous for the staggering beauty of its landscape. Into this fixed-sequence, almost unreal, footage the artist inserted a rain of fireballs, composing a surrealist picture that demonstrates her love of the eerie. The title, Exiles of the Shattered Star, suggests a distant catastrophe, the explosion of a star whose fragments have come to “find exile” in this corner of paradise. Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario, in 1972. Since 2003, she has lived and worked in Gateshead, England.
International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA)
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