Come through to welcome Mike Hoolboom for a night of the Canadian artist’s recent work in film and video.

“Mike Hoolboom has been one of the most prolific and influential filmmakers in Canada. Inhabiting an area of filmmaking that he has dubbed “fringe”—a hybrid between experimental, avant-garde, personal and political filmmaking, Hoolboom has produced over 80 films and videos, of which 10 are feature-length. While the term “fringe” may describe a marginal identity, Hoolboom’s films have had a significant impact on the cultural moments in which they appeared, particularly in regards to his missives from the position of a HIV-positive man. His films over time have described a rapidly changing Canadian cultural landscape with an aesthetic argument that is also political, articulating liberationist struggles for marginalized sexualities, identities and health status. While often angry, his films are also enveloping – an embrace towards a fluid cultural identity of multitudes that he has also modelled in his tireless advocacy of the work of his peers. Hoolboom has been able to harness the creative potential of the contemporary ubiquity of the moving image—his key composition structure has been the found footage collage—to describe life’s potential despite often staring deeply into death’s abyss.” — Chris Kennedy,  Mike Hoolboom Nomination Statement for Governor General Award

Based on Lisa Robertson’s poem-essay collection The Nilling, where the maestro writes about what must be refused in order to create the borders that make identity possible.

Wordless marital psychodrama of power, punishment and love.

Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves fifty years later.

Becoming again a ghost in the Czech Republic. A triangle of looking and departure.

Three-part colour inquiry. Questions adapted from Frederick Douglass to Jericho Brown bring the hurt. The images have been soaked in water until everything recognizable has been stripped away, leaving behind a wash of colours, a bacterial flow.

*mystery short

A conversation with Canadian painter Stephen Andrews returns us to a pre-cocktail moment, when being HIV+ afforded us the consolation of certainty.

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over eighty films and videos, though most have been withdrawn from circulation, approximately a dozen remain on view. His work has appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted the Tom Berner Award for community service and two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary.

Since 2004 he has been working on Fringe Online (www.fringeonline.ca), a web project which makes available the archives of 40 Canadian media artists. This ongoing project currently consists of hundreds of pages of transcripts, reviews, interviews and scripts, and remains the largest publishing project in the Canadian fringe media sector.