QUEER SCI-FI

@ 8PM PWYC

Misunderstood monsters, B-movie mutants, aliens and ghosts: Science Fiction deals in misfits and mavericks, the transformation of the human body, intergalactic sexuality, and gender from another dimension. Queer Sci-Fi explores how viewers are encouraged to identify with beings whose sexuality and desire may be different from our own, and tracks how the human body can be represented as the other a ghoul, zombie or digital avatar cancelling out gender differences. Yet these queer monsters often bring an element of fear to the narrative, and Sci-Fi's fantastical future landscapes are strongly ruled by male characters and their hetero relationships, despite the filmmakers' freedom of creation for new possibilities of love, desire and sexual interaction Fringe! Queer Art & Film Festival.

Films that work on the science fiction landscape, intentionally or not, and that address a queer identity, multiple or even asexual, and the fear related to its revelation. Here the human body is represented in a somewhat monstrous way, bodies that exist intermittently, which equalizes and eliminate gender differences, which decompose themselves, which are represented in their digital versions and that, finally, metamorphose and exorcise a kind of ritual. An atmosphere of mystery / horror that exists in a dual way: as a genre movie and in the characters themselves. They are characters who bring the fear to the film. The fear of the end of beauty, love, truth and happiness, emphasizing the similarity and the paradox that sees the binomial queer-monster, from a personal, almost diaristic to the authoritative voice that seems to come from beyond.

Science Fiction readers or viewers are encouraged to identify with monsters, mutants, aliens, ghosts whose sexuality and desire may be a different one from what we have learned and experienced, yet in the landscape of the future, events are predicted, suggested and created by their authors and the majority of these fictions are strongly ruled by male characters and their heteronormative relationships, despite the freedom of creation for new possibilities of love, desire and sexual interaction.

Other versions of this program were previously presented at Queer Lisboa 2013 and Fringe! Queer Art & Film Festival 2014.

PROGRAM

Love Fighter, Jennifer Chan, 1

Green Portal 43, Shana moulton, 4

Ici, L-Bas et Lisboa, Joo Vieira Torres, 18

Zenith, Bobby Abate, 9

Lyrica, Shana Moulton, 453

All Through the Night, Michael Robinson, 4

P.A.U.L., Jennifer Chan, 4

She Puppet, Peggy Ahwesh, 15

Holy Trannity, Jvlyn, 10

The Reason Why, Daniel McIntyre, 10

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Green Portal 43 USA, 2011, 4, Shana Moulton created a video in which two apparently alike creatures, dressed in the same way, make love by caressing objects and choreographing coded signs, appropriating certain stereotypes generated by the humans in their perception of extraterrestrials; but this a peaceful sexuality, exempt of hysteria or orgasm, privileging the well-being. Lyrica USA, 2012, 4'53. Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny Electronic Arts Intermix.Shana Moulton b. 1976 studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton has also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her video work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at Art in General, New York, Migros Museum, Zurich; Contemporary Museum of Art, Uppsala; Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris; Aurora, Edinburgh; Dark Light Festival, Dublin; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen; Broadway 1602, New York; and Gimpel Fils, London. Moulton's performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen, New York; PERFORMA 09, New York; Aurora Picture Show, Houston; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; among others.

Ici, L-Bas et Lisboa France, 2012, 18 places itself in a territory of bewilderment and perdition, allowing us only to see arid surfaces, like a desert shot during the night. The thoroughly examined body, in a mysterious description between animal and man, between monster and ghost, is only unveiled in the very end. The bodys intermittency between total darkness and the moments the camera examines it, so as the variations of its temperature among shades of grey and white, reveal other dualisms: to exist and not to, to be close or far away, to live in one city or the other. Joo Vieira Torres b. 1981, Recife, Brazil lives and works in Paris since 2002. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts and Drama, MFA in photography and video art from the ENSAD, Paris, followed by a 2-year residency at Le Fresnoy Studio national des arts contemporains from where he graduates in 2012. One of the main axes of his work is the question of "foreignness" and the forms of instability and tipping points of perspective caused by it. The foreigner, the displaced, the intruder as positive elements making more complex paradigms such as : objectivity vs. subjectivity, I vs. Them, belonging vs. rejection, proximity vs. distance In 2014, He had a solo show in the centre Pompidou, included in the Hors Pistes Festival program, he has exhibited also in the Palais the Tokyo, Villa Arson, Indie Lisboa, Tampere Film Festival, Vilnius Contemporary Art Center, Laboral, Kassel Dokfest, Curta Cinema, etc.

In Zenith USA, 2010, 9 an extraterrestrial or cyborg seems puzzled between a living man who can see it all, and a seemingly static and lifeless woman, in the backdrop of an abandoned TV broadcast room equipped with several video-surveillance monitors. Control and presence are seemingly two necessary elements for both television and a relationship. Bobby Abate, named by Film Comment magazine as one of the Top 25 Emerging Filmmakers for the 21st Century, came of age immersed in Internet subcultures charged by alter egos, super-natural fantasies, and vice, dynamics that shape his darkly humorous film and video. Widely exhibited and screened including at the 50th Ann Arbor Best LGBT Film, The Evil Eyes, Chicago Underground Film Festival Best Feature, Certain Women, Moscow and New York Film Festivals; MoMA, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the ICA in London.

All Through the Night USA, 2008, 4 takes Cindy Laupers song about freeing oneself from the world and about that person who is always looking after us. The film is not about that. Put together in a dream-like mode, it reveals a frozen, unknown, infinite, distressful, and un-terrestrial landscape, where light doesnt seem to come through. The image that seems very frail and tearing apart in order to become another landscape, induces us to the grandiloquence of the Universe, where we find ourselves lost and almost inexistent, just like beauty, youth and love are our creations, none of it really exists. Michael Robinson b.1981 is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience, riding the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. His work has screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, museums, and galleries including MoMA P.S.1, Tate Modern, The 2012 Whitney Biennial, The Walker Art Center, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Anthology Film Archives, Impakt, Media City, The Images Festival, The Ann Arbor, New York, Sundance, Rotterdam, San Francisco, London, Melbourne, Leeds, Vienna, Singapore and Hong Kong Film Festivals. Michael was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine, one of the "Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50" by Cinema Scope magazine in 2012,

Love Fighter P.A.U.L. Canada, 2013/2014, 1 4. In works like LOVE FIGHTER, Chan says, Im really thinking of the Internet as gendered space Im interested in how people negotiate masculinity and femininity online. That particular video grew out of Chans research into various sources: YouTube videos where teen boys teach each other how to rip shirts by flexing their muscles; other clips labelled muscle worship, in which men show off their bodybuilding prowess; forums on Askmen.com and Yahoo where people ask questions like How do I ask a girl out on Twitter? or How do I gain more muscle faster?; and even sites like pick-up-artist-forum.com where a community of men are trying to figure out how to be more comfortable in APPROACHING WOMENat the same time as they might get quite reductive about female psychology. Chan says that when she experienced these videos and forums, she thought about the pressure to be masculine, as well as idealized images of masculinity and how much it is tied predominantly to athleticism, and a kind of soldier figure. In this and other pieces, Chan hopes to look at what masculinity is online and put her own personal commentary or critique towards that. canadianart.ca. Jennifer Chan is a Video and new media artist working between Toronto and Chicago. Screenings includes Moseum of the moving Image NY, Images Festival, Transmediale, Conversations at the Edge, Eyebeam, WORM in Rotterdam, etc.

She Puppet USA, 2010, 15. From images taken from the Tomb Raider videogame, Peggy Ahwesh draws a reflection upon its protagonist: Lara Croft. The over-feminized body, nearly unattainable in real life and hard for its player to identify with not to speak of the overly sensual spasms -, contrast with the voice-over informing us that the protagonist doesnt necessarily have to be born from someone, she just materialized; she neednt be somebody, shes just like everyone else, no differences, foremost, from man and woman. But the body is thumped, repeatedly, by several men and animals. Nonetheless, she never fails to rise again, mechanically, controlled by its player. Peggy Ahwesh was born in 1954 and has been active in the media arts since the 1970s with a practice that includes: film production, feminist studies, media advocacy and studies in the history of the cinema. Ahweshs work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Library of Congress and has been widely shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Balie Theater, Amsterdam; the Filmmuseum, Frankfurt; the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rotterdam; Museu d'Art Contemporani Barcelona MACBA, Barcelona; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other venues. Her numerous awards include an Alpert Award in the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She teaches at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

The Reason Why Canada, 2009, 10. In this work, author Daniel McIntyre writes to Mark, to several Marks he met in his life, recalling the many encounters and disencounters they had before, making reference to several male and gay stereotypes. They all seem to haunt him Daniel McIntyre is an artist working with hand-processed film, experimental video and re-imagined media to explore the changing notions of personal history and identity.

Holy Trannity USA/Canada, 2013, 10 by JVLYN, a video in the form of triptych, explores the beauty and pain of a world that takes issue with every facet of the femme and gender non-conforming identities and calls us to action. Holy Trannity seeks to SAVE our lives, because if we do not demand the respect and recognition we seek, it will surely never be afforded to us. With the creation of Holy Trannity, J'VLYN opens themself to the world; there are no costumes, only outfits, there are no characters, only her. She's not pulling punches, she's not afraid; she's only telling her truth. J'vlyn together with D'Drops is an audio/visual queer union based in montreal.