TIFF’s movie-star glitz is shoved aside for experimental art in the annual Wavelengths presentations.
AGO’s Jackman Auditorium hosts five themed programs of daring projects designed to be projected on gallery walls. Here are a few highlights from the one TIFF series that is definitely not popcorn-appropriate.
Program 1: Analogue Arcadia (September 9, 9:15 pm) is a series of analogue film projects highlighted by Ben Rivers’s Sack Barrow, a lingering study of a crumbling London plating factory. The award-winning film offers a hypnotic portrait of the textures and peculiar rhythms of factory life.
Program 2 (September 10, 6:30 pm) is dedicated entirely to one piece, James Benning’s Twenty Cigarettes, in which 20 smokers consume a pack on camera. As in Warhol’s Screen Tests, Benning’s subjects are silently studied during their nicotine buzz, with secrets from their lives and subtle character ticks slipping in from the edges of the frame.
Program 3: Serial Rhythms (September 10, 9:15 pm) offers a curious collection of rhythm-based shorts. Rose Lowder’s Bouquets 11-20 is a stunning selection from her ongoing series dedicated to vivid jumping, vibrating images of European ecological sites filmed at various speeds and further manipulated through time-displacing editing.
Program 4: Space Is The Place (September 11, 7 pm) examines the concept of spaces and includes Neïl Beloufa’s mysterious Untitled, in which a California-style villa hosts a series of conflicting stories from tantalizingly faceless visitors discussing the former residents’ possibly nefarious activities with an elastic sense of truth.
Program 5: The Return/Aberration Of Light (September 11, 9:30 pm) is dedicated to two unique visions. One is Nathaniel Dorsky’s The Return, a 16mm collection of meditative if random images obstructed by or reflected through other objects. Projected at silent film speed, the seemingly mundane images have a haunting quality.
