MOVING ETHER WAY
December 2020
Camille Rojas
Dallas Fellini
Hiba Ali
sarah koekkoek
Curated by Holly Chang and Karina Iskandarsjah
Moving Ether Way presents newly commissioned digitally immersive performance art works by Camille Rojas, Dallas Fellini, Hiba Ali, and sarah koekkoek. In this exhibition, artists experiment with the convergence of performance art and virtual reality technologies. They intersect movement and dance with digital elements to explore phases of liminality and fluctuation within social, economic, and natural environments. Each work embraces the body’s role in mediating complexity and ambiguity; they examine the contemporary precarities in our relationships with labour, resources, and historical truths.
Hot Hysterical Stock Market Stumbles in Front of the Toronto Dominion Centre
Camille Rojas
This never before seen footage shows FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER the omnipotent and omnipresent (not EVER omnibenevolent) entity: the Stock Market. Donning a green $uit at a vastly empty Toronto Dominion Centre on a hot November day, Stock Market tries to keep her balance but stumbles as the people in suits pull and push at her from many different sides.
This happens everyday, Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 4pm, for the rest of eternity. How well did she perform today? What do you think? Maybe you can catch her there sometime if she decides to appear in the flesh again.
Strada Statale 696
Dallas Fellini
Strada Statale 696 explores trans presence in public hypermasculine spaces, using the Italian piazza (public square) as a point of departure. The artist’s body is inserted into a Google Street View image of a piazza in Celano, a small Italian town where their grandparents grew up. This work seeks to trace a trans oral history ambiguously passed to them by their Nonna: an oral history about (closeted) trans and queer people that she was friends with as an adolescent and young adult in Celano. Fellini explores their distance from this history: temporarily, geographically, and linguistically. This linguistic distance is informed by their lack of fluency in Celanese, a dying Italian dialect geo-specific to Celano, which is often associated with the uneducated and the lower class. Fellini draws from their attempts at learning Italian—to close the distance between themselves and a suffocated trans history. Hyper-location-specific sound, imagery, and language combine to pose questions about the past trans occupants of the space Fellini digitally inhabits: Who were these people? How can we walk backwards against centuries of deliberate censorship and erasure of trans histories?
Translation assistance by Francesco D'Andrea.
Production assistance by Holly Chang and Karina Iskandarsjah.
Technical assistance by Andrew Cromey.
workers liberation as environmental justice
Hiba Ali
In the video, workers liberation as environmental justice, Hiba Ali uses 360 interactive vision to imagine a world without Amazon featuring a world, framed with environmental motifs, without the obsessed metrics of time, Amazon boxes, and Alexas.
From one realm to another
sarah koekkoek
At the heart of this work is Cootes Paradise, a marshy nature preserve located in Hamilton ON*. Beginning in 2014, a 4 year 24 billion litre sewage leak threatened the already battered wetlands, leaving communities that care for the marsh frustrated with faulty and dated methods for sewage management and stormwater runoff. These methods create incessant fractures between human life and the life of water. The work From one realm to another shares a felt reality that water and human life is analogous and interconnected. While respecting the resiliency of the marsh, koekkoek welcomes us into an imagined post-anthropogenic world where the emotional weight and power of water is honoured from one realm to another.
Sound by Matthew Cardinal.
*The City of Hamilton is situated upon the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas.