Open Secret: Film Screenings + Workshops

The artist-led workshop component is specifically for students. Please share widely!

Open Secret is a series composed of screenings and workshops featuring the work of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Kriss Li, Sharlene Bamboat and Sofía Gallisá Muriente. 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. These works present a way to renegotiate what forms around the binaries of outside and inside, of what we know and what we don’t need to know, of expanse and enclosure. The four artists invite us to think alongside them about the effects of subtle transformations, the eroticism of language and translation, dispersion and collectivity, the architecture of permeability and impermanence. All through what might inspire new formations of the diasporic image.

Curated by Nasrin Himada

All screenings are free and open to all. The workshops are free and open only to students. Register as space is limited.

Partners: The Screening Room; OPIRG Kingston; Reelout: Kingston’s queer film + video festival; and the Department of Film + Media, Queen’s University

Parastoo Anoushahpour

Screening + Conversation 
Thursday, 19 January, 6–8 pm
The Screening Room,  120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
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Workshop
Friday, 20 January
11:30 am–2:30 pm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
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Parastoo Anoushahpour (Iran / Canada) is an artist originally from Tehran now based in Toronto working predominantly with film, video and installation. The Time That Separates Us, (2022) circles the story of Lot’s wife and its related sites of mythology, ancient salt-rock formations found doubled across a contested border. In the process the Pillar of Salt becomes a portal through which to face the contemporary Jordan River Valley, its heavily militarized border and complex infrastructures of tourism, and the stigmatized realms of desire, sexuality, and gender encoded within this highly mediated political landscape.

Kriss Li

Screening + Artist Talk 
Thursday, 9 February, 6–8 pm
The Screening Room,  120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
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Workshop
Friday, 10 February, 11:30 am–2:30 pm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
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Kriss Li is a multimedia artist who creates films, installations, and conceptual projects that explore structures of power. These works investigate the foundational divisions and hierarchies that maintain our social order—the ways these systems condition us in spite of our intentions, and the hidden sites of possibility that we can exploit towards greater collective capacities. This program features an artist talk and screenings of some short films by Kriss.

Sharlene Bamboat

Screening + Conversation
Thursday, 9 March, 6–8 pm
The Screening Room, 120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
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Workshop
Friday, 10 March, 11:30 am–2:30 pm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
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Sharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her practice often engages with translation, history and music, uncovering sensory and fractured ways of knowing. Sharlene regularly collaborates with artists, musicians and writers to animate historical, political, legal, and pop-culture materials. If from Every Tongue It Drips (2021) explores questions of distance and proximity, identity and otherness, through scenes from the daily interactions between two queer women—a poet and a cameraperson.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Screening + Conversation
Thursday, 6 April, 6–8 pm
The Screening Room, 120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
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Workshop
Friday, 7 April, 11:30 am–2:30 pm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
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Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose research-based practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Sofía has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, Annenberg Media Lab at USC and the Flaherty Seminar, and participated in residencies such as Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal). This program features two screenings: Celaje (2020) and The Envoy (2022).