An interview with Ayesha Hameed
Ayesha Hameed is a guest programmer for SAVAC's upcoming Monitor 7: New South Asian Short Film + Video event on March 24th. In an interview, she reveals her experiences with film and sheds light on her involvement with Monitor 7.
When I was a student at Concordia University a few years ago, a short video essay that I made called Fire, Fences, Flight was selected to be screened at Monitor 3 and I had the opportunity to come to Toronto for the screening. In the years since, SAVAC has screened this work at different events including their 2010 School's Program. So as a result of my initial inclusion in Monitor 3, SAVAC and I stayed in touch, and over a year ago Haema invited me to be the guest programmer of Monitor 7.
How did you select the work? What are some highlights?
SAVAC generously let me be involved in the selection process right from co-writing the call for works. We kept the call as general as possible in order to get the largest selection of experimental works. As a result the submissions were amazingly diverse! From all parts of the world, from all walks of life. On the one hand it was daunting to choose from work that was so strong in so many different ways. On the other hand it was an amazing experience to see such a breadth of work. To me what was most surprising was that even though we did not specify a theme for this programme, in screening the fifty odd shorts that were submitted I began to see themes repeat across films and videos that looked at things and objects in a non-nostalgic, disenchanted way. I found this interesting as I think that there is a perception that with a diaspora, the main interest would be in finding continuity or links with the past, rather than disenchanting it. I also cannot emphasize enough that the selection process was a collaboration with the SAVAC jury Erik Martinson, Pablo de Ocampo, Ananya Ohri, Dinesh Sachdev and especially Srimoyee Mitra, the SAVAC Programming Coordinator who played an extremely active role at every stage.
I think all the works are so strong. Bangalore-based artists Smriti Mehra and Tahireh Lal's Tade describes the aftermath of the Ganesh festival after the idols are immersed into the lake. As they are now made of plastic instead of clay, they have to be fished out of the water after the ceremony. Jane Chang Mi's No Title records a Buddhist monk throwing rocks at dogs outside of a monastery in Nepal. The violence with which he initially throws the rocks tapers as he realizes he is being filmed.
Vivek Shraya's Seeking Single White Male depicts a sequence of Polaroid snapshots of a young man with disingenuously racist comments written on it. The Torontonians' performance video How to be a brown teen delves gleefully into the uncomfortable candidness of teen humour. Nabil Ahmed's What is the Weight of the Moon? is a set of interviews with students from Bangladesh studying in East London and facing visa problems.
In Md. Hasan Morshed's Protocol a body takes the place of the hour hand on a clock. The rhythm of the body transforms time into something embodied and material. In Ambereen Siddiqui's Lying in Wait, time becomes tangible in her exploration of repetition and anxiety due to failed communication networks in Karachi. Meanwhile, in The Dilemma, by Sharmila Samant, what seems to be the image of a pregnant belly is juxtaposed with ideas of dread that grow with time.
Asim Waqif's An Experiment on MG Road depicts the building of a structure under a bridge, which both materializes and bears witness to the voice-over of a lecture to urbanists. The camera in Shereen Soliman's The Capsule stages a quiet inventory of the artefacts surrounding her mother's terminal illness. This muteness is extended in Nahed Mansour's staging of auto-ethnography in Measuring where her mouth painfully becomes an object to store tongue depressors. This notion of ethnography is inverted in Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's The Exception and the Rule, where, through its fictional protagonist Raj Kumar, it seeks its object of representation.
Did being a video artist yourself influence and feed into your practice as the programmer of Monitor 7?
My own practice deals with migration and borders and I work in performance video and make video essays, so I imagine some of those interests are reflected in this program. Many of my performance works deal with using simple objects as props, so perhaps the notion of objects and inventory resonated with me all the more.
I think that curating this program has definitely influenced my art practice. It is fascinating to be able to see such a diversity of work and find connections between them so that together they make a collective impact and demonstrate a theme that would not exist in quite the same way with any other collection of works. In other words, the experience of working on this program with SAVAC has enriched my understanding of concepts I was already working with.
What would you like the audience to go way with after the screening of Monitor 7?
Hopefully the audience will come away feeling that there is a nice conversation between these works, and surprising connections that I hope will linger with them afterwards. I think with works being produced by and about South Asia around the world, there is an infinitely rich exploration of ideas about time, technology, memory and the moving image itself. So hopefully people will be surprised, intrigued and excited by how these artists are moving beyond cliché and testing what ideas can be explored by testing the limits of the moving image – sometimes with drama and flair, and sometimes
with the most quiet and subtle inflections.
MONITOR 7: New South Asian Short Film + Video
When: Thursday, March 24th, 2011,
Where: Innis Town Hall
2 Sussex Ave.
Toronto, ON
Time: 7:30pm
For more information click HERE.
MyBindi.com is a proud sponsor of this event.
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