GUT_BRAIN Video Program (Part 1)

Blackwood Gallery

A screening of short films by twelve artists exploring extractivist capitalism, feminicide, labour rights, penetrative potency...

Small World Centre

GUT_BRAIN 1

GUT_BRAIN is an exhibition series inspired by the primary movements of the digestive system: ingestion, propulsion, mechanical breakdown, chemical digestion, absorption, and elimination. Staged in six movements in sites between Canada and Mexico.

Small World Music Centre, Unit 101Artscape Youngplace (180 Shaw St, Toronto)12–4pm screening with a catered intermissionServing as a counterpart to the exhibition in the Blackwood galleries, this program of short videos by twelve artists explores extractivist capitalism, feminicide, labour rights, penetrative potency, reproductive justice, metabolic rifts, bodily sovereignty, and healing rituals. GUT_BRAIN is an exhibition series inspired by the primary movements of the digestive system: ingestion, propulsion, mechanical breakdown, chemical digestion, absorption, and elimination. Curated by Irmgard Emmelheinz and Christine Shaw and staged in six movements in sites between Mississauga, Canada and Oaxaca, Mexico, the project moves from injury to potential, from separation to symbiosis, from damage to possible futures.The first movement, Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess, materializes at the mouth. As a site of ingestion, sexuality, sustenance, and language, the mouth tracks the origins and symptoms of injurious forms of interdependency that have led to our toxic world. It is on view from September 2023–March 2024 at the Blackwood Gallery, across the UTM campus, and other auxiliary locations. For more information visit <a href="https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/program/gut-brain-1" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">blackwoodgallery.ca</a>.This video program features:<ul><li>Tala Madani’s The Womb (2019) is an animation that depicts a fetus who can see the history of the world projected inside the womb and decides to take radical measures.

</li><li>Patricia Domínguez’s Madre Drone (2019–20) is a mirage where a serpent-woman has a luminous encounter with a robot that could be human, delivering a kind of cosmic enunciation that connects us with recent student protests in Chile.

</li><li>Laureana Toledo’s Order and Progress (2013–15) provides a visual history of the transformations of the Istmo de Tehuantepec—a geographic region that spans the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz—from the past forty years and links it to the fallen dreams of modernization, extractivism, and cultural colonization.

</li><li>Yoshua Okón’s Canned Laughter (2009) features a fictitious factory in which dozens of maquiladoras from Juárez were hired by the artist as consultants and performers, and instructed to generate different forms of laughter, destined to be canned in a factory, and exported and served to North American consumers.

</li><li>Paloma Contreras Lomas’ Gold Fever (2023) is an experimental sex-melodrama that addresses the dark outcomes of political organization living on after the peak of syndicalism in the 1980s.

</li><li>Tala Madani’s Overhead Projection (Crowd) (2018) is an animated comedy about the phallic domination of masculinity. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds.

</li><li>Teresa Serrano’s La Piñata (2003) pictures a performance of feminicide, simultaneous male hate, and desire for the female body. Serrano uses the common childhood game of breaking a piñata that usually ends with a reward to construct an allegory of femicide that ends with no penalty.
</li></ul><ul><li>Adrián Balseca’s Suspensión 1 (2019) features a performance allegorizing the modern desire for progress at the cost of extractivism and a metabolic rift with the earth. Balseca’s intervention recreates the games of “cucaña” (climbing pole) or “palo ensebado” (greasy stick) as a representation of colonialism and resource extraction in the Amazon.

</li><li>Regina José Galindo’s La sombra (The Shadow) (2017) documents a performance in which the artist is persecuted by a military tank for as long as she can run, alluding to US military occupation and intervention in Central America. José Galindo dedicates this work to all women who go unnoticed and whose cries remain unheard.

</li><li>Alberta Whittle’s business as usual: hostile environment: a REMIX (2021) explores the colonial history of the Fourth Clyde canal in central Scotland and the role of waterways in the voluntary and involuntary movement of people. This new iteration of the film includes ‘the horrors of COVID-19’ and the racial inequalities it has exposed. 

</li><li>Marisa Morán Jahn’s Snatchural History of Copper (2023) renders a multimedia project in which the artist traces “where the copper in my snatch comes from.” What unfolds is a cosmological exploration of a mineral that lives with(in) us and on which our households, cities, digital desires, and selves depend.

</li><li>Alberta Whittle’s from the forest to the concrete (to the forest) (2019), reflects upon colonialism, climate change, inequality and the legacies of slavery in the context of the wreaking havoc on several Caribbean countries after hurricane Dorian.

</li><li>Ignacio Acosta’s Litte ja Goabddá [Drones and Drums] (2016–18) examines the use of drone technologies in the protests by activists and Sámi people against a mining exploration project Gallák in Jåhkåmåhkke (Jokkomokk), Norrbotten Country, Sweden.
</li></ul>A﻿ccessibility: Small World Music is located on the first floor of the Artscape Youngplace building, with a wheelchair ramp at the 180 Shaw Street doors, an elevator servicing every floor and a fully accessible washroom on every level. The venue has wheelchair accessible seating.GUT_BRAIN 1 is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Christine Shaw’s research was supported in part by a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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GUT_BRAIN Video Program (Part 1)

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GUT_BRAIN Video Program (Part 1)

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