Southern Currents - Latin American Media Arts Symposium
GUEST SPEAKERS
Elena Feder is an independent scholar and curator in Vancouver, BC. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and a MA in Spanish and Portuguese from Stanford University, a MA in Comparative Literature from the University of BC, and a BA (Hons.) in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. Her scholarship has been recognized by academic awards and distinctions from the universities she attended and by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council and the BC Council for the Arts. A fluent speaker of Spanish, English, Yiddish and French, she has curated programs, taught, lectured and presented papers in Canada, the United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Israel.
“Is there a Latin in this room? Thirty years of “Latinidad” in Canadian Cinema. Part of her on-going study of the contribution of Latino film and video makers to Canadian film culture in the last thirty or so years. Her work not only focuses on the impact and singularity of their work within and without specific communities of vision, but also maps out their place in Canadian film history as an important focus of nomadity in the diasporic experience of the Americas.
Susan Lord is Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media. She has undertaken curatorial projects of media arts, worked with artists groups and artist-run centres for over 20 years. Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queen's University. She is co-editor of the anthology Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (2007), co-editor of New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness and a Research Associate with Visible City (www.visiblecity.ca). She curates programs of media arts and is a member of the Public Access collective (www.publicjournal.ca).
Writer, editor and curator Susan Jane Douglas, PhD, teaches contemporary art history and theory at the University of Guelph, where she specializes in the culture and art of contemporary Latin American artists. She has lectured on the subject of Latin American and conceptual art at The Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant (Toronto), and at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, among many others. She has published in Canadian Art, The University of Toronto Quarterly, Parachute, C Magazine, nparadoxa, Public, and Art Papers. She is joint editor, with Bruce Barber, of an anthology titled, "Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Bodily Fluids in Art and Art History" (forthcoming). She is currently working on a book titled, "Global Raiders: Artists in a World Without Borders," a collection of essays directed to artists, art students and gallery goers on the widespread phenomenon of artists (including bloggers) who "raid" in a new, morally ambiguous territory where cultural material is plundered to serve subversive pleasures.
Dot Tuer is a writer, cultural theorist and historian whose research focuses on issues of postcolonialism, transculturation, indigenous-European encounters in the Latin American colonial period, and the intersections of history, memory, and hybridity in contemporary art. A book of her selected writings, Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology, and Cultural Resistance, was published by YYZ Press in 2005.
Tuer has written for many museums and galleries, including the National Gallery of Canada, the DIA Centre for the Arts, NYC, the Sydney Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale, and the ICA in London, England; and presented public international lectures on art in Europe, Latin America, Australia and North America. She has received numerous awards for her writing on art, including Canada Council and Ontario Arts Councils grants; Toronto Arts Awards; and Ontario Art Galleries Association Curatorial Writing Awards. She has served at OCAD as Chair, Curatorial and Critical Practice (2007-9); Interim Chair, Graduate Program in Criticism and Curatorial Practice (2008); and Associate Dean of Liberal Studies, Ontario College of Art and Design (2003).
Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan, media artist based in Toronto with a background in visual arts. She is a PhD candidate in Environmental Studies at York University, she also holds an MFA degree from the same university, Toronto, Canada. Her work predominantly involves photography, video, electronic and digital processes. Gelis’ work addresses the use of
image in relation to displacement, landscape and politics beyond borders or culturally specific subjects. In her latest works she has expanded her practice using electronics and programming for interactivity. In her installation work she creates immersive sculptural spaces, using video projections and complex sound designs.
She also works as an educator/mentor, leading video and photography workshops aimed at youth in marginalized communities in Canada, Colombia and Panama. Because she works as a workshop mentor in several countries, in many cases her teaching practices determine the artistic work that she creates. She has been concerned with the role of the artist as a multidisciplinary inquirer who engages in multiple explorations of diverse methodologies in the fieldwork. Her work has been shown in several venues in Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Argentina and the United States. She has developed curatorial projects and video screenings, and programs for festivals in Latin America and Canada.
Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist. His multidisciplinary critical practice spans performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites since 2005. These venues include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Art Gallery of York University, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video, Images Festival, NuitBlanche, Harbourfront Centre, Sur Gallery (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, LIVE, VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver), Darling Foundry, MAI – Montreal arts interculturels, Fofa Gallery (Montreal), University of Western Ontario (London), Queens University (Kingston), Neutral Ground (Regina), Third Space (St. John) Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), Voices Breaking Boundaries (Houston) Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki).
PARTNERS
The Latin American Studies program at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese provides students in the social sciences and humanities an opportunity to engage and deepen their understanding of Latin American regions, their histories, politics, cultures, economies and societies. Courses encourage students to situate both their special interests and the contemporary debates in fields such as anthropology, political science, geography, literature, or history within a broader interdisciplinary framework, while at the same time committing themselves to an understanding of the historical, cultural and political experiences of Spanish and Portuguese America. Through an engagement with different texts and faculty expertise, this program trains students in current themes such as postcolonial thinking, critical readings of colonial histories, literary and anthropological genres, comparative politics, politics of indigeneity and human rights, as well as in environmental policies and political economy of Latin America and the Americas as a transnational whole. With the possibility to carry out curricula experience in Latin America, this program also offers an important lead for career development experiences on Latin America. This knowledge is increasingly necessary for Canada, as the country enters into new trade, political, environmental, and academic agreements with our emerging hemispheric partners.
CERLAC is a York University-based hub for inter- and multidisciplinary research on Latin America and the Caribbean, their diasporas, and their relations with Canada and the rest of the world. It provides a meeting space for faculty, students, and visitors to discover common interests; supports their projects by facilitating grant administration, partnership formation, and the co-production and sharing of knowledge; and trains new generations of regional scholars.
Recognized since its founding in 1978 as the preeminent LAC research body in Canada, CERLAC furthers York’s mandate for excellence in international and community-engaged research by producing high-quality, socially progressive scholarship in collaboration with partners throughout the Americas and close to home. Crossing boundaries between North and South and building bridges between the university and its constituents, CERLAC grounds critical reflection on Canada’s role in its hemisphere.