TRYING ANGLES: FROM BLOOD TO TRIANGLE TRADE
A screening and talk with Alice Ming Wai Jim
Wednesday, 4 December 2019, 7 PM
In partnership with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
Hosted by the Toronto Media Arts Centre

Twenty-five years lie between Buseje Bailey’s six-minute video Blood (1992, Vtape) and Jérôme Havre, Cauleen Smith and Camille Turner’s animated film Triangle Trade (2017), a period which has witnessed a significant growth of not only artistic productions by artists of African descent and their increased visibility in art institutions, but also major contributions to the fields of Black Canadian art history and curatorial practice. Through the trying angles of these two moving image works, this combination of talk and screening explores the parallel yet connected historical contexts from which they emerge.

What links the legacy of “Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter”—the first exhibition devoted to work by Black women artists in Canada, curated in 1989 by members of the Diaspora African Women’s Art Collective (DAWA) Bailey and Grace Channer at the height of Canadian racialized identity politics—to the global art movement Afrofuturism (named in 1993), and to Canada’s own Black radical tradition that gives rise to the makers of Triangle Trade’s three puppets avatars who reflect on diasporic states of blackness that reach simultaneously into multiple selves, histories, and futures? Jim will discuss these varied issues in relation to the two films, followed by a discussion moderated by Yaniya Lee.

All events are free and open to the public. The venue is wheelchair accessible.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories. She is co-editor-in-chief of the international journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Her research on diasporic art in Canada and contemporary Asian art has generated new dialogues within and between ethnocultural and global art histories, media arts, and critical curatorial studies.