Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Curators Elizabeth Matheson and Christine Ramsay for Strandline Curatorial Collective and the University of Regina, in association with Timothy Long (Head Curator, MacKenzie Art Gallery) developed during the Fall 2013 Curatorial Intensive in New York. The proposal eventually became  is a durational series of events taking place in Regina, Saskatchewan, from Spring 2014 to Spring 2016.


Meet in the Middle is a durational series of events taking place in Regina, Saskatchewan, from Spring 2014 to Spring 2016. Conceived as a succession of stations connected by common concerns underlying global migration and unfolding over this twenty-four month period, the project enables artists, audiences, and researchers to encounter and reflect on the experiences and memories of diverse flows of people recalled and documented through the practices of expanded cinema.

Inspired by a recent influx of national and international immigrants, Meet in the Middle occurs in Regina, a place inhabiting both the margins and centre of Canadian consciousness. Located on the Canadian plains at great distances from other major cities, the area nevertheless claims an important history of transformational undercurrents in art and film (e.g., the first Arts Board in North America and the first art gallery in a public library). Today Regina continues to innovate in new media exhibition methodologies and display, and enjoys a growing festival scene, including Indigenous perspectives through the Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective and the Mispon Film Festival.

In Regina, art and film are powerful mediums through which to explore the notion of belonging, particularly as new immigration patterns further diversify the cultural dynamics of the city. There are several organizations working collaboratively across art and film, the white cube and the black box, the analog and digital divide, the gallery and public spaces to take their place in the contemporary global landscapes of expanded cinema and create a place for local, national, and international artists, curators, and audiences to come together to “meet in the middle.”

Several stations and sub-stations are conceived for this journey—including a terminal for research, archival curating, artistic residencies and production, and audience exploration; exhibitions; and a symposium—in which a city on the margins is transformed into a gathering place.

Station 1 | MITM Contact Room

Meet in the Middle conceives galleries as junctions, and sites of research, development, and the dissemination of art and film’s material, cultural, and social production.

The MITM Contact Room will be set in an existing cultural centre with a satellite space in Regina’s downtown, providing a web-based as well as visible public space for artists, filmmakers, curators, students, professors, and audiences—people with various perspectives on migration and memory. The contact room will provide a space in which one can experiment with the fresh aesthetic possibilities emerging between art and film, new forms of curatorial display, and alternative archival approaches to connecting local and international moving image histories and practices.

Projects will be drawn from a repository of archives (the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, National Film Board, Dunlop Art Gallery, Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum and Saskatchewan Archives) housing materials on experimental filmmaking, moving image history, early projections by Krzysztof Wodiczko created for city spaces in Regina, as well as landmark new media projects.

The Contact Room will also build knowledge platforms through site-specific art/film residencies and projects led by artist-researchers (such as intermedia artist Rachelle Knowles [Regina]; conceptual artist Mktrich Tonoyan [Armenia]; and multi-media artist Adrian Stimson [Saskatoon], among others) to engage participants through their various migrant and Indigenous experiences.

Station 2 | Exhibitions

Alongside the activities of the MITM Contact Room, a series of interconnected exhibitions will be curated, profiling local, national, and international artists who are adept at mixing historical and contemporary, local and global perspectives on issues related to memory and migration. In addition to internationally renowned artists Shirin Neshat and Atom Egoyan, this station will profile such artists as Knowles, Tonoyan, and experimental filmmaker Gerald Saul, among others.

Shirin Neshat: Soliloquy
MacKenzie Art Gallery, December 14, 2013–March 30, 2014
Organized and circulated by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as part of their Momentum series, Soliloquy (1999) is a key piece in the oeuvre of Shirin Neshat. It is a double-screen color video projection depicting memories of exile for a woman caught between two landscapes: a Middle Eastern desert city and a western metropolis.

Atom Egoyan and the Place of the Witness
MacKenzie Art Gallery, September–December 2015
The first retrospective of renowned Armenian-Canadian filmmaker and installation artist Atom Egoyan, this exhibition is scheduled to coincide with the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, one of Egoyan’s longstanding concerns in relation to diasporic identities. It will include eight works of art, screenings, artist-curator interviews, a multi-authored critical catalogue, and projected national and international tours.

Station 3 | Symposium

Meet in the Middle: Dialogues on filmic transformation in contemporary art is a three day symposium in September 2015, providing a space for collective reflection on the transformations occurring in art galleries as they envision new places and spaces for configuring moving images. Scheduled to coincide with the opening of the Egoyan exhibition and keynote address, artists, filmmakers, curators, theorists, storytellers, educators, and the audience will be invited to have conversations on theories and practices that are currently bringing art and film together to powerful effect, where global experiences of displacement, as well as new hopes of placement and belonging meet.

 

Learn More


To learn more about this proposal please email Elizabeth Matheson at strandlinecc@gmail.com. To learn more about the Curatorial Intensive email info@curatorsintl.org.