Kandis Friesen (CA)
Launch: May 7, 6:00 PM
Discursive activities: May 28, 1:00 PM
© Image: Kandis Friesen, Tape 158, Video Still (Forest).
Emerging from an ongoing body of work, Tape 158: New Documents from the Archives is anchored in a 1991 auto-ethnographic videotape –unfinished, untranslated, and badly-made –found in a Russian Mennonite archive in Winnipeg. Simply labeled Tape 158, this video footage moves through a small village in southeastern Ukraine, inquiring about its histories, materialities, architectures and possibilities at the edge of a post-Soviet moment. This ‘found’ footage forms the foundation for the installation’s central work, Green Fields, a re-filming of the original footage in the same village twenty-five years later. Produced in Zelene Pole, I worked with a small crew and local women to re-film in the same locations, following the cameraman’s movements like a score. In tandem with filming, I spoke with villagers on the same themes as the original tape –of evidentiary architecture, childhood, diasporic linguistics, exile and state violence, and the ongoing presence of the war(s). The resulting installation is a meditation on such things, in all their minute and multiplied forms: an experimental essay that shifts through future-past narrative modes, asking how body, nation, and time are defined within and without us.
A five channel video version of this exhibition was installed and set to open March 13, 2020, at TRUCK Contemporary Art (Mohkinstsis/Calgary), just as the status of pandemic was announced. Instead of opening, its state of extended storage became the project Extended Indefinitely – a series of tangential publications and cyclical citational forms, co-authored with Indu Vashist and supported by TRUCK. This project is grafted onto the exhibition at articule, which itself has been reworked as site-specific to lockdown: distributed, visited, and self-constructed. The works in this new exhibition are a newsprint artist text co-authored with Indu Vashist, distributed through public postings and a newspaper rack outside the gallery; a provisional constructivist billboard contained by the gallery space, holding an image of a thousand and a hundred years at once; and a self-installed version of the video installation Green Fields, hosted online and installed by the viewer on their own devices, as two open browser tabs in a sea of indefinite content and sense of time.
Kandis Friesen works with the dispersed monumental. Her compositions build from architectural, material, and spectral inhabitations of exile, amplifying minute and myriad histories at once. Anchored in diasporic sitespecificity, her recent work in writing, video, sculpture, and sound uses history as a central material, proposing collaged frameworks for structural resonance, repositioning, and dis/repair.
Discursive Activity
Discussion
What Is To Be Done, Then? An Artist Talk
With Indu Vashist, Stefan Christoff, and Kandis Friesen