IMAGES FESTIVAL 29 at various locations from Thursday (April 14) to April 23. Rating: NNNNN
As it has for nearly three decades, the Images Festival concentrates the finest media art from around the world in downtown Toronto. And as always, there’s so much to cover that I’m bound to leave out something really interesting.
This year’s festival starts by literally bringing people to art: the 29th festival kicks off Thursday (April 14) with an art crawl through 11 installations and exhibitions at galleries like Vtape, Mercer Union and Xpace. Check the website for the full schedule, or just download the Images Festival app and navigate it on the fly. (The app also includes a scavenger hunt game that looks like fun.)
The festival’s cinematic component gets under way Friday (April 15, 7 pm) with Im Heung-Soon’s Factory Complex, a grim documentary about South Korean women who pushed back against miserable working conditions in the 60s – and how their struggles echo through subsequent dec-ades of female empowerment. Im will be here to present the film, and for an artist’s talk at the Campbell Conference Facility earlier in the day.
Saturday’s Conundrum Clinique (April 16, 9 pm) showcases works by local artists. I was struck by Robin Collyer’s CLOSED, a stop-motion tour of Honest Ed’s that gives us the impression of wandering the premises after hours, and Bridget Moser’s Memory Foam, which is organized around seemingly random items purchased from amazon.com. Oliver Husain’s Parade, also in this program, repurposes condominium sales videos to explore the fantasy they present from a very different angle.
For an exploration of Toronto itself, check out Mike Hoolboom’s Incident Reports (Wednesday, April 20, 9 pm), which marries a series of fixed shots of Toronto life – each around a minute in length – to a philosophical voice-over. The result is an evocative portrait of an individual disconnected from his community and seeking a way back in – which Hoolboom provides in an utterly unexpected (and delightful) way.
And on the archival side, Images is screening a new DCP of Chantal Akerman’s 1977 documentary News From Home (April 23, 7 pm), tied to TIFF Cinematheque’s salute to the late director this week.
Images is co-presenting that series, which includes three screenings of Akerman’s final documentary, No Home Movie – a film to which News From Home now serves as a melancholy bookend. See them both. Make the time. If this festival teaches us anything, it’s that art is always waiting to be found.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
