Thursday 21 November
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Another milestone: Agnes is closed to the public as we prepare for Agnes Reimagined. Stay tuned for plans for off-site programming!
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Aman Sandhu, The Magic Roundabout, 2021, digital video, 11:45. Courtesy of the artist.
Screening
10 February, 4 pm
The Screening Room, 120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
Workshop
11 February, 1:30 pm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
All events are free and open to all. Register as space is limited.
Open Secret: The Second Edition continues as a series composed of screenings, conversations, and workshops with artist and guest curator Aman Sandhu.
This series takes its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” Similarly, cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering, and the double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in its making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration.
Aman’s film program invites us to consider the use of archival material. Searching through archives especially familial ones, might provoke and intensify the discovery of that which has not yet been told. Aman touches on this compulsion of the search, toward that which has not yet been experienced, through his art practice and research on the effects of the rupture in sound and moving image. By making this break, the films in this program have affinities with Afrological improvisation, which moves through “known-knowns,” only to diverge and allow the new to come through. This immersion in improvisation creates unexpected movement and a rhythm that is always already in emergence: what is possible when form deviates and transforms?
Curated by Nasrin Himada
The Screening Room, 120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
The program features films by Aman Sandhu, Matthew Arthur Williams, Alia Syed, and Timothy Yanick Hunter.
The Magic Roundabout uses a notorious traffic intersection in the southwest town of Swindon as a stage for a series of stories about alternative forms of labour within a local Punjabi family. Shot entirely from a car that drives continuously inside the roundabout, the film creates a state of suspension and disorientation, and forms a tension between what are ‘margins’ and ‘centres’ in practices of resistance. A central focus of the narrative in the film critiques normative colonial framings of South Asian migrants and questions the framing of the good immigrant.
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Soon Come is a film and sound installation, split across two opposing screens made with 4K digital video, 16mm analogue film, personal archival photographs, archival footage and audio sourced from Stoke-on-Trent City Archives, Media Archive of Central England and Staffordshire Film Archive. The opposing screens present a fight for the viewers’ attention, hinting at the impossibility of authoritatively archiving complex and ever-changing communities of people. Using detailing images of the Staffordshire landscape that has been touched in some way by human presence or industry, it is overlaid with various voices from my own family and others in the Caribbean community of Stoke-on-Trent, providing intimate anecdotes of movement in communities across vast distances.
Matthew Arthur Williams is an artist and DJ. Williams was born in London and now lives and works in Glasgow. He completed his BA at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2012. His work has recently been exhibited at Incubator Gallery, London (2024) Gathering, London (2023) Dundee Contemporary Arts (2022), Jupiter Artland and Johnson Terrace Gardens both as part of a commission for Edinburgh Art Festival (2021) with forthcoming shows at Govan Project Space (2024) and a solo show at Stills, Edinburgh (2024). He has further developed exhibition projects and commissions with the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow (2022), Teile2o46, Berlin (2022) Viborg Kunsthal (2021), Street Level Photoworks (2019) and Transmission Gallery (2017). Williams’ research has recently been supported through programmes at Photoworks, PRIMARY Nottingham, CCA Glasgow, The Bothy Project, Hospitalfield, LUX Scotland. In 2023 Williams was the Cove Park Bridge Awards Emerging Artist recipient.
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“I keep returning to Hi-8 videotape my father shot in the winter of 1995/6, that until a month ago, I did not know even existed. The tape had been lying dormant in a box with the camera he had bought.
‘Today is the 25th December 1995.’
I am looking at the house we grew up in; it is covered with snow. My father has walked part way up the hill; he continually comments on the scene but the tape has degraded so it’s difficult to catch exactly what he says – every time I view the footage I glean a different meaning.
I have been a servant to the video. It called out to me to mend it, but I also wanted to destroy it; it has been re-captured digitally, held within different codes, the signals have reconvened, allowing a different picture to emerge, an-other home movie.” –Alia Syed
Commissioned by Ruth Noak for Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, Snow is a performative video diary; a family archaeology of what you can and can’t ‘uncover’or ‘access’ through the image.
Alia Syed is an experimental filmmaker who’s work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world. She is interested in storytelling, time and memory and the juncture of personal realities which she explores through different subjects positions in relation to culture, diaspora and location. Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world including BBC Arts Online (currently), The Triangle Space: Chelsea College of Arts (2014), Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012-13, 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); XV Sydney Biennale (2006); Hayward Gallery, London (2005); Tate Britain, London (2003); Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Scotland (2002); Iniva, London (2002); The New Art Gallery in Walsall (2002); and Tate Modern, London (2000), Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid (2009), Courtisane Festival, Belgium (2019) WKV, Stuttgart (2019) and Yale Centre for British Art (2019). Syed’s films have also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi.
The first Monograph devoted to Alia Syed’s work Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fictions (ed. María Palacios Cruz) published by Courtisane Festival was launched in 2023 in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival.
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True and Functional is an ongoing series of works, exploring African diasporic histories and cultural memory. In this iteration, True And Functional (Extended), Hunter continues his investigation of the glitch as a refraction of possibilities. The figures in the film, drawn predominantly from archival footage, are presented and re-presented in fragments. True and Functional (Extended) models the form and process of memory, creating a non-linear narrative from different beats and fragments, reveling in the beauty of opacity, echoes, and imperfections.
Timothy Yanick Hunter is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. Hunter’s practice employs strategies of bricolage to examine non-neutral relationships relating to Black and Afro-diasporic experiences as well as concurrent strategies of decolonization. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic, with a focus on the political, cultural and social richness of the Black diaspora. Hunter’s work often delves into speculative narratives and the intersections of physical space, digital space and the intangible. Hunter received his BA from the University of Toronto, and has been artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; PADA Studios in Barreiro, Portugal; and Black Rock Senegal, Dakar. He was included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, and longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, A Space Gallery, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Centre Clark, Montreal; 92Y, New York; ILY2, Portland; Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph; and PADA Studios, Barreiro; among others. Hunter lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Aman will discuss his research on improvisation, focusing specifically on the work of musician and scholar George Lewis. Anchoring the workshop will be Lewis’ articulation of Afrological improvisation, a movement through known-knowns unlike a chance-based mode characteristic of Eurological improvisation. Aman will facilitate close listenings to recordings by Julius Eastman, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee and invite participants to think with Afrological improvisation and what it offers for image-based practices.
Aman Sandhu works between Montréal and Glasgow. His installations encompass drawing, moving image, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that refuse to come into view through institutions’ unrelenting calculations. Through improvisation, he aims to rethink the place of refusal in critique to produce other ways of coming to knowledge. Sandhu studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Klasse Rita McBride) and received his MFA from The Glasgow School. He is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD at Concordia University, Montréal. Sandhu was awarded the 2020 Emerging Visual Artist Residency at Cove Park (Scotland). He has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada), Grotta Air (Spain), Hospitalfield Arts (Scotland), and What About Art? (India). He has exhibited at Centre Clark, Montréal; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal; Glasgow International 2021; Market Gallery, Glasgow; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Celine Gallery, Glasgow; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Younger than Beyoncé Gallery, Toronto; and FOCUS Photography Festival, Mumbai.
