Biophilia: Artist and Archive (Streams ~) Nuit Blanche 2022

In collaboration with the Archives of Ontario, Archive/Counter-Archive is organizing six media art installations across York University’s Keele campus as part of this year’s Nuit Blanche festival. Five of these will be united under the exhibition title, Biophilia: Artist and Archive, with the sixth being tied to the launch of CineMobilia, a new mobile infrastructure dedicated to digitizing archival moving image material.

See below for Janine Marchessault’s curatorial statement and details on each of the individual projects. If you have any questions, please reach out to the Archive/Counter-Archive Knowledge Mobilization Officer, Andrew Bailey, at kmo@counterarchive.ca.

Curator
Janine Marchessault

Producer:
Asad Raza

Artists:
Chris Chong Chan Fui, CineMobilia (Mobile Archiving Bus), Jennifer Dysart, Deirdre Logue, Jenn E Norton, Public Visualization Studio

Curatorial Statement
Biophilia: Artist and Archive references a love of living things. At the heart of the exhibition are more than human animals and our entanglements with them. The five artworks commissioned for Biophilia: Artist and Archive offer an extended conversation with the Archives of Ontario’s exhibit Animalia which engages with a history of animals in the archives documented through photographs and films. Biophilia seeks to reimagine archival interfaces — interactive screens (Public Visualization Studio), CRT sculptures (Logue), architectural projections (Dysart), water and AR (Norton), and a planetarium (Chong). The artists reflect upon the place of animals in Indigenous cultures, their hidden histories beneath the earth, the AI fabulation of bestiaries, and ancient knowledge systems transformed by climate change.

CineMobilia — mobile archiving and presentation bus will be launched at Nuit Blanche with a micro-cinema set up across from the Archives of Ontario. Screening throughout the evening will feature archival films from the Archives of Ontario, documentaries as well as artists’ experiments and performances with archival film projections.

Click here for more information on each of the artist projects in Biophilia: Artist and Archive.

Sponsors:
Biophilia: Artist and Archive is funded through the City of Toronto, Nuit Blanche, Archive/Counter-Archive’s Partnership Grant, the Canadian Film Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Featured Image Credit: Chris Chong Chan Fui, Nocturnal Zodiac, 2022, AV installation, image courtesy of the artist.

This event is a part of the York University Year of the Arts, presented by the York University School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD).