Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
Curator Zoë Chan moderates a panel discussion with featured artists Kirsten Leenaars and Marie-Kristine Petiquay of Wapikoni Mobile to discuss their use of documentary video to present personal, political and social concerns of a community. The panel will focus on issues that documentary raises about the politics of representation and opportunities it provides for new forms of social practice.
This event was livestreamed on January 27, 2024 and included Q+A by online participants.
About the Artists:
Kirsten Leenaars is an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through shared authorship, staging, and improvisation. Leenaars’ work has been shown internationally at venues including The Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Printed Matter, Inc., New York; the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She currently is a Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Marie-Kristine Petiquay is an Atikamekw from the community of Manawan. A multidisciplinary artist, she also participated in the writing, composition and recording of a song for the album “Nos Forêts Chantées”, in addition to performing it twice at the Présences Autochtones festival and the Kwe! Encountering Indigenous Peoples in the summer of 2017. Her photographs have also been exhibited in several group shows. She is co-writer of the feature documentary The Invisible Wall (2020), for which she received a nomination at the 36th Gemini Awards in the category of Best Screenplay: Documentary – Broadcast. She also won the Francophone development grant awarded by the NFB, as part of the Talent Lab of the Rencontres internationales du documentaire à Montréal, for the production of her first feature film Aniskenamakewin.
Wapikoni Mobile’s mission is to promote the expression of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people through film and music creation and the dissemination of these works. By offering Indigenous talent one-on-one support and mentoring, our organization contributes to their personal, professional, and creative development while respecting their narrative sovereignty. Wapikoni provides these artists with a distribution service to disseminate their works across Canada and the world, promoting knowledge and building awareness about First Peoples’ realities. Since 2004, Wapikoni has collected more than 1400 short films and 900 musical pieces, visited 45 communities and 36 nations in Canada and abroad, won more than 220 awards and mentions, and demonstrated a strong presence at hundreds of festivals and events.
