The Commons @ 401 Curation: SERIOUS BIZ
Lead curators Kelly Lui and Kaitlynn Tomaselli
30 mins
All Ages
One weekend a year, dozens of sites open their doors for Doors Open Toronto, a city-wide celebration recognized as one of Torontoâs most culturally significant events. The City of Toronto is excited to work with the community to showcase their sites to residents and visitors.
FADO, imagineNATIVE, Reel Asian, SAVAC, and Vtape, collectively known as The Commons @ 401, are pleased to present the film curation to be SERIOUS BIZ for this year’s city-wide Doors Open event. We invite drop-in visitors into the Bachir Yerex Presentation Space to view a rotation of films hand-picked by this yearâs leading curators, Kelly Lui and Kaitlynn Tomaselli.
âThe city is your playgroundâ prompts this edition of Doors Open. Full of movement, room for stillness, and plenty of contradictions, SERIOUS BIZ brings together six short films which display the interconnectedness and synergy of what it might mean to play together.
Textured, emotive, and delightful, each short presents its own expression of their relationships to themselves (including the AI partner-in-crime), the land, and one another.
SERIOUS BIZ PROGRAMME
DaynaAI
Director: Dayna McLeod
Canada | 2023 | 1:00 min
English | Performance Short
An introduction to DaynAI, an AI doppelgÀnger for queer media artist, Dayna McLeod.
DaynaAI: This is not Dayna McLeod’s gibber
Director: Dayna McLeod
Canada | 2023 | 1:00 min
English | Performance Short
Media artist Dayna McLeod uses her AI actor, DaynAI to discuss the challenges of working with an AI actor and AI voice-cloning subscription fees.
Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the bodyâs social and material conditions. Her video and performance work have been presented at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in SĂŁo Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre dâart contemporain in Paris, the PHI Centre, OFFTA, and Rendez-vous du cinĂ©ma quĂ©bĂ©cois in Montreal, the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Performatorium, Queer City Cinemaâs performance festival in Regina.
a tangled web drowning in honey
Director: Hannah Hull & Tara Hakim
Canada, | 2023 | 10:00 min
English | Experimental Short
a tangled web drowning in honey is an experiential and textural short film that invites viewers into the inner workings of a mind to ponder the ways in which we love and unlove ourselves.
Hannah Hull (they/them) (UK) is an artist and musician, also known as Burning Salt. The ancient practice of âburning saltâ is an act of expulsion, purification or protection. Hull uses song, poetry, drawing, animation and film to these ends. They studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. After a decade of specialism in socially-engaged art, Hull is currently focused on exploring somatic practices and trauma. They are also a boat dweller, TEDx speaker, intersectional feminist, queer person and recovering addict.
Tara Hakim is a multi-disciplinary, process-based artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. Of Palestinian heritage, born and raised in Jordan with an Austrian grandmother, Tara creates public displays of vulnerability that invite viewers to meditate on notions of self, diasporic existence, and the liminal spaces in-betweenâboth physical and mental. Working across video, installation, performance, and, more recently, textiles and ceramics, she intertwines the complexities of cultural history and personal psychology with an experimental, playful, and tender approach. Tara holds a BA (Hons.) in Media & Cultural Studies and an MFA in Documentary Media.
POP
Director: Noor Gatih
Canada | 2024 | 4:31 min
No Dialogue | Experimental Short
POP explores sisterhood, friendships and bonds that feel karmic. The film documents two sisters, Marium and Laila Vahed, as they spend a seemingly ordinary day trying to pass the time. Marium, the older sister, retreats into a book, while Laila, the younger and more restless sibling, struggles to connect with her sister.
Delicate bubbles appear and start floating between them. Enchanted by the bubbles, the sisters find themselves drawn into a playful dance as they attempt to keep the bubbles from popping. Their differing approaches to the bubbles explore how they feel for each other.
Noor Gatih (she/her) is a filmmaker and arts facilitator. Her work explores gender and generational patterns, memory, her queerness, language and history through the lens of photography, family archives and film. Recent projects have included, revisiting archival photographs, experimenting with super 8mm and other analogue processes, as well as working on short documentaries. Her work often invites the viewer to reflect on these different modes of storytelling and the ways they reveal the complex relationships we hold with each other and ourselves.
MOOZ MIIKAN
Director: Evelyn Pakinewatik
Canada | 2018 | 8:00 min
English | Documentary Short
In search of moose in the vibrant near north, a life-long hunter tests his rifle. Mooz Miikan offers a quietly intimate and candid portrayal of an aging hunter with his youngest child on their traditional territory.
Evelyn Pakinewatik (Nbisiing Anishnaabe/Irish, Nipissing First Nation) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. Evelynâs work explores the intersection of dreams and memory and the societal distortion of interiority, relationality, and animacy. An artist raised by artists, Evelyn began working alongside their parents from a very young age to preserve and disseminate traditional textile and nature arts in Indigenous communities across Ontario and QuĂ©bec. Interconnectivity and reciprocity continue to motivate Evelynâs creative process as they seek to practice anti-colonial survivance through an inclusive lens.
Inclinations began as a moment of âcripâ play. Alice Sheppard and Danielle Peers finding themselves on a 90-foot ramp on âsocial streetâ: the main entrance of the Kinesiology building at the University of Alberta. After a lifetime of climbing awkward, ugly ramps hidden away behind buildings with barely enough room for one chair user, this wide-open slope-scape sent us both literally somersaulting over the rails in our wheelchairs for nearly an hour.
Alice Sheppard took her first dance class in order to make good on a dare; she loved moving so much that she resigned her academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance. She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she toured nationally and taught in the companyâs education and outreach programs.
Danielle Peers is a community organizer, an artist, and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. They were a Vanier and Trudeau scholar throughout their PhD at the University of Alberta, and a Banting Postdoctoral scholar at Concordia University in Montreal. Danielle uses critical disability theories to study disability movement cultures: from the Paralympics, to inclusive recreation, to disability arts. Their research builds on their experiences as a Paralympian, a filmmaker, and a dancer with CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton). Danielle is the Director of the Media in Motion Lab, which supports creative methods for producing and sharing knowledges about human bodies in motion.
