Screening Lecture by Lisa Birke Event

LISA BIRKE

Lisa Birke is an award winning Canadian experimental short film maker who situates between the traditions of painting, digital video and performance art. She has had solo exhibitions across Canada and her short films have been screened at film/video festivals and media centres internationally, including amongst others: Vancouver International Film Festival (Canada), Slamdance Film Festival (US). Birke created projects for CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area), the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery in 2016 and has just completed ?The Knits? with the support of an Ontario Arts Council Media Artists Project Creation Grant.

Lisa Birke examines notions of ?self? through the lens of gender, bringing the cultural tropes of woman into focus and into question. Filmed unaccompanied in the Canadian landscape, absurd yet insightful performative acts become entangled in nuanced and complex narratives in single and multichannel video works that make reference to art history, mythology and popular culture. Birke is currently Assistant Professor of Digital and Extended Media at the University of Saskatchewan.

?The Knits? follows the arduous task of knitting a sweater, while at the same time watching this same sweater unravel as it makes its way across Canada. Along the way, the film tugs at the crossed threads of familial ties, art versus craft, gendered materiality, and the relationship we have with mother nature and her great divide.

?The Knits? is a loving yet humorous homage to the artist?s mother and her chronic affliction of ?the Knits?.

?Endgame? is a rumination on dualistic thinking as pitfall of the human condition?metaphorically situated in both personal conflict within the self and interpersonal conflict between groups of people from a socio-political standpoint. In a single-channel video installation, good and evil, us and them, brawn and beauty, and black and white are pitted against one another in a psychological drama where no winner can be declared. A field of ladies, one side clad in white dresses and the other in black, stand face-to-face entrapped within a choreographed and mythological battle of will and death that is locked in an eternal stalemate.