re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 3: Che Applewhaite presents: Interference, 83' ―

This program evidences essay filmmaking as a home for world-building relationships to personal and collective realities.

Interference concentrates on works that expand documentary art’s grammars by rescripting and gesturing beyond the vestiges of its enclosures: words, linear time, reason, the human, genocide, and unnecessary suffering to name a few.

AFTERMATH… filmed by Ceasar Williams, creator of YouTube channel Ballroom Throwbacks TV, inaugurates an interest shared by all artists in gestural repertoires within and beyond words, reason, and “the human”.

A New England Document makes the documentation of an Indigenous genocide unacceptable, after my own experience of academic study led me to reimagine the architectures of its source material: an ethnographic photography archive.

Renee Green’s ED/HF surfaces the ongoing becomings of both labouring in art and artworks themselves, connecting the viewer’s present with its portrayed creators’ influences and (after)lives. Described conceptually, her work tells time anew, populating our formal universe with unassumingly precise gestures of perspective and place-making.

The indivisible nature of individuals continues in I AM THE WORLD, which I made to understand how Ballroom Throwbacks TV’s cameraperson and protagonists depict each other outside of gender and race’s violent straight lines.

Jordan Lord’s After...After... (Access) recursively refracts the political and economic impacts on their life abilities of a surgery that threatened them with death. It reframes what constitutes the main ability with which this program concerns itself: the making of art within and of life.

The program closes in the black that predominates let me breathe, which I made to honour how its protogranists’ spiritual activism sustains the lives of the children in their care, after their own had been stolen by the police.

The formal strategies in these works are material conversations between layered structures of feeling across time. I am enlivened by these citations, where linearity is lost and lineages are honoured to remix and revalue sites of being.

Interference is dedicated to the movements of my families in and out of Canada; my grandfather’s time studying in early sixties Ottawa
and my cousins’ present passage t/here. -C.A.

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Outdoor Screening
Friday 09 August 2024 · 9:00pm screening
401 Richmond Courtyard · 401 Richmond Street W., Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

AFTERMATH @ FEMININE DESTRUCTION FIRST FRIDAY 6/6/14 PART 4 ·
Ballroom Throwbacks TV A New England Document ·
Che Applewhaite ED/HF · Renée Green I AM THE WORLD · Che Applewhaite After...After... (Access) · Jordan Lord let me breathe · Che Applewhaite

I AM THE WORLD

Directed by Che Applewhaite
UK · 2022 · 9'00

I AM THE WORLD is a speculative documentary that explores how an archive of networked moving images, featuring famed ballroom hosts Selvin “MC Debra” Mizrahi and Kelly Gorgeous Gucci, enables worldly ways of seeing.

Che Applewhaite is an artist and writer. He facilitates engagement with how ongoing histories interfere with intimate, difficult, and collective experiences. He works primarily with video, photography, and written text in hybrid documentary forms. These works embed listening as both practice and ethic of invention, embracing the pain of change and honesty that his many gendered mothers taught us about love.

Recent work includes untitle, “HANDLE WITH CARE” (2024, sculpture) which is currently on show in the national touring exhibition Jerwood Survey III, UK (2024-25) and A New England Document (2020, moving image) which is streaming on The Criterion Channel (USA/CA) until April 2025. Solo presentations include transmediale, DE (2023). Selected group exhibitions include National Gallery of Art, USA (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, USA (2022), Cubitt Gallery, UK (2021). Selected screenings include Sheffield Doc/Fest, UK (2020), Aesthetica Film Festival, UK (2023) and the Royal Anthropological Institute Festival, UK (2021, 2023), among others. He has written for Tanya Leighton Gallery, Open City Documentary Festival, Millennium Film Journal, and Harvard Magazine. He is an artist-in-residence at Somerset House Studios, London, UK. [↗]