Monitor Reruns

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) presents a series of programming to mark a decade of critical and innovative experimental film and video. Over the past 10 years, Monitor: South Asian Experimental Film + Video has explored the transnational currents depicting the varied linguistic, social and historical landscapes that define the South Asian subcontinent. Shai Heredia, founder of Experimenta (India’s first experimental film festival), has curated Monitor Reruns, an exhibition that draws from the Monitor archives.

In partnership with A Space Gallery and Images Festival, Monitor Reruns brings together five Canadian artists whose works represent the last decade of Monitor. Engaging with themes ranging from personal narratives of trauma to accounts of colonial history, migration and queerness, the artists have written a reflective text to accompany the re-installation of their films/videos.

Monitor Reruns traces the political and aesthetic shifts in South Asian film and video in Canada, from the sixties to the present, interrogating whether geographical boundaries are a location, a philosophy, an identity, or something else entirely.

Featuring works by Nurjahan Akhlaq, Ayesha Hameed, P. Manasaram, Vivek Shraya & The Torontonians.

Fire Fences and Flight by Ayesha Hameed, 2007 (5 minutes 10 seconds). Hameed’s video is an essayistic take on two fire-fueled events in Europe that reveal folly in policy matters, and the timeliness of public dissidence in reaction to a troubled immigrant condition.