Mike Hoolboom’s MARK
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 18, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 6pm | Mike Hoolboom in person!
- Image: Mike Hoolboom, Mark (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked.” — Deleuze and Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus
Award-winning Canadian filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom makes his Chicago debut appearance with the premiere of Mark (2009), an elegiac portrait of his friend and collaborator, Mark Karbusicky, who committed suicide in 2007. Mark weaves together childhood snapshots, found footage, and interviews with Karbusicky’s friends, family, and longtime partner, transsexual performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross, to map the contours of a life lived “in the background” and trace the mark he left on the communities around him. Curator Mark Webber notes, “few filmmakers use re-appropriated footage in such an emotive way…Hoolboom’s recent work is in profound sympathy with the human condition that speaks directly to our hearts.” Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. 2009, Canada, video, 70 min.
MIKE HOOLBOOM (1959, Canada) is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made fifteen films and videos, which have appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary. He is the author of three non-fiction books: Plague Years (1998), Fringe Film in Canada (2000), and Practical Dreamers (2008) and one novel, The Steve Machine (2008). He has co-edited books on media artists Philip Hoffman (2000) and Frank Cole (2009), and co-authored a book on David Rimmer (2009). He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and the experimental film coordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. He is the recipient of twelve international retrospectives of his work, most recently in Poland.
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
