Writer and curator Amy Fung, who has been appointed artistic director at Toronto's Images Festival. Photo: Anthea Black.
Amy Fung—a writer, curator, facilitator, and researcher currently based in Vancouver—has been announced as the new artistic director of Toronto’s Images Festival.
When asked how her extensive experience in writing—which has seen her criticism published in Canadian Art, Art Papers, Akimblog, Fuse, and Frieze, among other publications—would impact her approach to the festival of independent and experimental film and video, Fung said the job ties together a number of her concerns and experiences.
“I still first and foremost consider myself a writer, and most curators I respect are persuasive writers, but increasingly over the last six years I have been left with more questions than answers in my art writing,” Fung tells Canadian Art via email. “Putting together programming initiatives has become a way for me to work out some of these questions, or at least put it into a more specified context and conversation with invited artists. While I may primarily be known as an art critic, my formal background is actually in English literature and film and media studies, and I have always maintained connections to that world, so I am really looking forward to bringing everything together under the rubric of Images.”
Fung also notes that Images’ chosen medium is often addressed these days in an art context.
“I think ‘moving image culture’ has completely saturated itself within gallery exhibitions, and I think that’s largely due to our screen-dependent relationship to connectivity, to the world,” Fung writes. “I have a lot of ideas on how to bridge these conversations, but first, I am just going to hold on and try to get through my first festival.”
Prior to being based in Vancouver, Fung travelled the prairies reporting on art for the blog she founded in 2007, Prairie Artsters, among other outlets. Fung’s recent curatorial projects include a two-day reading series featuring Maria Fusco, Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, and Jacob Wren co-presented by Artspeak, the Western Front and 221A in Vancouver; and “They Made A Day Be A Day Here,” a touring exhibition at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, the Mendel Art Gallery, and the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba.
The 28th annual Images Festival is due to take place at various Toronto venues in April 2015.
