Canadian Art is pleased co-present Images Festival’s 2019 Canadian Spotlight: KC Wei, featuring a screening of the artist’s first feature film Murky Colours, on April 13, and an artist talk on April 14. The artist talk will be followed by a discussion with Merray Gerges, assistant editor at Canadian Art, at Small World Music Centre.
Screening
Murky Colours, KC Wei
Toronto Premiere, Canada, 2016, digital, 47 min, English/Mandarin
Murky Colours is based on a spy novel by Menjin Wei, the filmmaker’s father. It is not, by any measure, a conventional adaptation, although it does begin to chart the poetics of one. Through the arena of participatory documentary and film essay, fiction and document seem to conspire to tell a story of an unrealized film as family heirloom.
Menjin’s novel was written with the aspiration of being adapted into a Hollywood film. In his daughter’s adaptation, all the markers of the genre are present but unravel through KC Wei’s arrangement of drama and archive that come together with a writerly consideration.
Action scenes are intercut with Wei interviewing her father, him reading from his manuscript, gonzo footage of their family trip to China, and Hollywood and Hong Kong action films. Her editing and post-production techniques amplify the tropes of spy movies and pulp novels. The adaptation of Murky Colours, revitalized within its own lifetime, pulls its viewer into considering the internal chronologies of an artwork.
Preceded by
In Free Fall, Hito Steyerl
Germany, 2010, digital, 32 min, German/English
If we follow the disintegration of a Voeing 707-700 4X-JYI, we are put on the trajectory of the global economic crisis. One day you’re flown by Mossad, the next, blown up behind Keanu Reeves. A neverending swan song.
April 13, 2019 07:30PM
Innis Town Hall
2 Sussex Ave
$12 general admission
$6 students, seniors, underemployed
Artist Talk
Canadian Spotlight artist KC Wei will deliver a talk about her music, publishing and community driven projects, as well as her latest film, art rock? The Popular Esoteric (2018) — a recent document of overlaps in Vancouver’s underground music and art scenes. Her talk will be followed by a conversation with journalist and critic Merray Gerges.
April 14, 2019, 3:00 P.M.
Small World Music
180 Shaw St Suite #101
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BIOGRAPHIES
KC Wei is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Vancouver. In 2016, she began Agony Klub, a music and printed matter label that releases material under the framework of the “popular esoteric”. Her music projects include Kamikaze Nurse, hazy, and Late Spring.
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is currently professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts. (Tate)
Merray Gerges is a journalist and critic who writes around art rather than about it. In summer 2016, she was Editorial Resident at Canadian Art, where she is now Assistant Editor. Her reporting and criticism—which tend to address art’s contexts rather than its contents—have appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, MOMUS, the Walker Art Center Reader, Hyperallergic and more.