Outer Worlds: Panel Discussion

Outer Worlds: Panel Discussion

Friday, March 8, 2024

1:00–2:30 p.m.

Room 222, Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, 390 King Street West

Outer Worlds panel discussion with Dr. Marchessault and artists Oliver Husain, Leila Sujir, and Mani Mazinani.

Janine Marchessault is Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research engages with the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR). She belongs to the CinemaExpo67.ca research group. Her latest project is an expanded cinema project, Outer Worlds (outerworlds.org) – commissioning five IMAX films by artists, which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 and will begin touring soon.

She is the Director of Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage (2018–2024), a research collaboration involving more than 20 community and artist-run archives devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ2+, immigrant, and women’s communities. Her most recent monograph is Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Ecologies, Utopias (MIT, 2017) and co-edited collection Process Cinema: Handmade film in the Digital Age (MQUP, 2019).

Leila Sujir is an artist working in video and video installation. Over the last forty years, Sujir has been building a body of video art works using a mix of fiction, fantasy and documentary with visual and audio collage techniques. Her video art works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery  (Liverpool), as well as galleries all over the world. Her work is in collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Glenbow Museum. Leila Sujir is a professor emerita in the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University. She leads an art research studio-lab based at Concordia University, Elastic 3D Spaces, that most recently received a SSHRC grant, Thinking Allowed (2022), and a Canada Council production grant (2022).

Oliver Husain is an artist and filmmaker. His projects are often collaborations with other artists and friends; and often begin with a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages, technical experiments and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups. Recent exhibitions include Beauties of Lucknow,  a site-specific installation commissioned by Massey College, Toronto; Lenticoolers at Gallery Susan Hobbs, Toronto (with Malik McCoy); I don’t know you like that at University of Buffalo Art Galleries and Exposure at Camera Austria, Graz (both with Kerstin Schroedinger); all 2023. His website is husain.de; his livestream performances (with Amy Lam) are available on drip-drop.tv

Mani Mazinani was born in Tehran in 1984, he lives and works in Toronto. Mazinani’s interdisciplinary practice includes installation, video, film, sculpture, photography, multiples, sound, and music. He makes work that connects scale and perception, improvisation and ancient thought. Recent exhibitions and performances include Monitor 15 (SAVAC, 2023), Stories and Storefronts, Toronto (2022); Tate Modern, London (2019, with Michael Snow); The Bentway, Toronto (2018); Tehran International Electronic Music Festival (2017); Suzhou Industrial Park Culture and Arts Centre (2016); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2015); and CAB Art Centre, Brussels (2013).