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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Both programs are free and open to all.
Register as space is limited.

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, and the architecture of permeability and impermanence. All through what might inspire new formations of the diasporic image.

This series offers an opportunity to showcase each artist’s work in an intimate setting, with conversations to follow the screening. As well, each artist facilitates a workshop the next day. This is a chance to think with them on process, practice and form and on how to build a foundational framework for collaboration to take place.

Curated by Nasrin Himada

Screening

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. Created between three locations: Montreal, Batticaloa and the Isle of Skye, and connected through languages – Urdu, Tamil & English, personal and national histories, music and dance, and the gaze of the camera lens, they explore subjects both expansively cosmic and intimately close—from quantum superposition to the links between British colonialism and Indian nationalism.

Workshop

Sharlene and participants will have the opportunity to engage in a more intimate setting as we use this time to screen older works, as well as get a chance to showcase a new work-in-progress. We’ll gather to talk, discuss, inquire about Sharlene’s practice, and workshop ideas and strategies as we watch and listen in context. The films that will be screened are: The Wind Sleeps Standing Up and Video Home System, along with a ten-minute cut of a new film Sharlene has been working on.