Screening and Talk with Alice Ming Wai Jim: Trying Angles

Join us for a talk and film screening by Alice Ming Wai Jim in collaboration with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC). Inviting artists and curators to respond to E-A’s programming, and to the CFMDC film collection, these ongoing curated screenings activate holes, gaps and omissions as strategies for intergenerational knowledge transmission, political resistance and feminist praxis.

Twenty-five years lie between Buseje Bailey’s six-minute video 𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥 (1992, Vtape) and Jérôme Havre, Cauleen Smith and Camille Turner’s animated film 𝘛𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦 (2017), a period which has witnessed a significant growth of not only artistic productions by artists of African descent and their increased visibility in art institutions, but also major contributions to the fields of Black Canadian art history and curatorial practice. Through the trying angles of these two moving image works, this combination of talk and screening explores the parallel yet connected historical contexts from which they emerge.

What links the legacy of “Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter”—the first exhibition devoted to work by Black women artists in Canada, curated in 1989 by members of the Diaspora African Women’s Art Collective (DAWA) Bailey and Grace Chan at the height of Canadian racialized identity politics—to the global art movement Afrofuturism (named in 1993), and to Canada’s own Black radical tradition that gives rise to the makers of 𝘛𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦’s three puppets avatars who reflect on diasporic states of blackness that reach simultaneously into multiple selves, histories, and futures?

This event is part of EMILIA-AMALIA’s year-long collaboration with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), titled HOLES AND HOW TO FILL THEM.

All events are free and open to the public.

𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗪𝗮𝗶 𝗝𝗶𝗺 is a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories. She is co-editor-in-chief of the international journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Her research on diasporic art in Canada and contemporary Asian art has generated new dialogues within and between ethnocultural and global art histories, media arts, and critical curatorial studies.