Aerial Skin is a two-part video and performance program that examines how artists use the image to dissect notions as wide-ranging as identity, indigeneity, and queerness; space, safety, and belonging; community and the fragility of otherness. The program offers a moment to breathe, to react, and to reflect on our collective conceptions of freedom and politics, and how they have become intertwined with technology. It moves towards a definition of freedom as a utopian but hard-to-reach concept that can be activated through technologies of representation that enable us to live freely without constraint, to create and express identities, to govern ourselves.
How can the fluidity of identity be transmitted through the image?
In the first part of this series, video works by Kent Monkman and Jacolby Satterwhite collide. Together they form a space of expression and community as they explore the impact of colonialism, canonical histories of art, and heteronormativity on bodies and identities. Monkman’s alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle acts without restraint and with humour to transform and challenge Canadian history, while Satterwhite uses technology and his body to make space for and examine queerness.
The second part of the event presents videos and a performance. At once calm, frenetic, and confrontational, language, images, and documentation can transmit different states of being, as well as feelings around queerness. Tanya Lukin Linklater’s This moment an endurance to the end forever (2020) is an exercise in slowing time through breath and endurance. Yutong Lin explores fluidity through language and state of being in their video Perspiring Memory, Venting Air (2021). Pedro Neves Marques looks at queerness in between reality and science fiction in The Bite (2019) and Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (2022). Lastly, FIGHT ME is a performance by Kim Ninkuru, that invites us to think about the safe space using language and confrontation.
This event is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Terms of Use presented at the PHI Foundation from March 8 to July 9, 2023.
Curator: Victoria Carrasco