Screen Scene & Oracle at Vtape, Fall 2011

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Vtape Creative Director Lisa Steele invites you

to join us for the second world premiere of a new work

Mani Mazinani

video composition

a collaboration with

Udo Kasemets

music composition

ORACLE

Video, 2011, 14:14

world premiere

Saturday, October 1, 2011 2-5pm

the artist in conversation with

composer Udo Kasemets at 3:00pm

SCREEN SCENE and ORACLE are on view at Vtape through October 14, 2011.

Jacob Korczynski‘s specially commissioned essay on Mazinani’s work is available on-line at www.vtape.org and also at Vtape

In ORACLE, Mazinani returns to his musical background, collaborating with Canadian music icon nonagenarian Udo Kasemets, producing an electronically manipulated video signal using contemporary versions of early video synthesizers, deftly producing a work that references the past without a hint of nostalgia.

Based in the ancient Chinese system of oracular divination, the I Ching, ORACLE creates a “time-space” where the collaborators each explore the rich minimalism of duality, Mazinani by limiting the visual elements within each frame, Kasemets in heeding the internal imperative for sound-followed-by-silence in his deconstructed composition for solo piano. Mazinani says of this work, “ORACLE is … the process of taking things apart to find the whole. Treating parts as wholes, divided to reveal elements, constructed to reveal a whole. Building through decay. Deconstruction into binary languages. There are no shortage of different binary pulses in ORACLE. These many strings harmonize through interference, forming a body.”

Mani Mazinani (b. 1984, Tehran, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist having produced and continuing to produce work in video, installation, music, painting, photography, printmaking, performance and sound, He makes videos and installations, such as Scalene (2008), Light Air (2010) and Once (2011) that are shown regularly in festivals and exhibitions, including a two person show alongside Michael Snow in 2010. His improvised and composed musics are presented frequently in recordings and performances. He specialized in visual art and ancient philosophy at the University of Toronto and continues to study such fields of thought.

His activities are documented at www.manimazinani.net

Udo Kasemets (b. 1919, Tallinn, Estonia) is a composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, piano and electroacoustic works. Trained in Estonia and Germany, he emigrated to Canada in 1951 and has held numerous teaching and conducting positions as well organizing a number of important initiatives within the music community including founding the Toronto Bach Society and the Isaacs Gallery Mixed Media Ensemble which brought together musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, poets, and technicians in nine events featuring works by American and Canadian artists of “radical tendencies” (The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada). From the 1960s onward, Kasemets’ compositions have revealed his engagement with the work and philosophy of John Cage. He lives and works in Toronto.

Both programmes available on request at Vtape September 17 – October 14, 2011.

401 Richmond St., #452

Toronto, ON M5V 3A8

416 351-1317

Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday 12-4pm

For more information, contact info@vtape.org

www.vtape.org

Vtape Creative Director Lisa Steele invites you

to join us for the official opening of the fall season at Vtape

with two world premieres by

Mani Mazinani

SCREEN SCENE

Video, 2011, 13:19

Saturday, September 17, 2011 2-5pm

artist’s talk at 3:00pm

Jacob Korczynski‘s specially commissioned essay on Mazinani’s work is available on-line at www.vtape.org and also at Vtape.

We begin our focus on the work of Mani Mazinani with SCREEN SCENE, his mesmerizing visual experiment with light and sound. SCREEN SCENE yields a rich dialogue between the physical properties of film, digital technologies and chance. At once elegantly simple and intricately textured, Mazinani applies the improvisational techniques of a musician (which he is also) to this experiment in visual phenomena.

As the innocent interaction between a video camera and a film projector unfolds, the viewer plunges helplessly into the uncanny, doubting one’s own eyes. Descending into that place of the spectral where anything might happen, SCREEN SCENE is full of pleasure yet strange and disquieting in equal measure.

In his essay on the work, writer and curator Jacob Korczynski speaks to this sense of embodied discomfort, saying, "The channel of light that poured upon me pushed at the corners of the room until I reached out for a middle that I could not grasp, but nevertheless knew was - must be - there. Raised in defense of my eyes the collection of torn pages in my hand collapsed into a single text - typefaces bleeding as they were illuminated beyond recognition, recto and verso no more."

SCREEN SCENE is a work that must be experienced “in the flesh”, through the eyes and in the mind, a work of great beauty and mystery.

Mani Mazinani is a multidisciplinary artist having produced and continuing to produce work in video, installation, music, painting, photography, printmaking, performance and sound. He makes videos and installations , such as Scalene (2008), Light Air (2010) and Once (2011) that are shown regularly in festivals and exhibitions, including a two person show alongside Michael Snow in 2010. His improvised and composed musics are presented frequently in recordings and performances. He specialized in visual art and ancient philosophy at the University of Toronto and continues to study such fields of thought.

His activities are documented at www.manimazinani.net

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Mazinani’s second new work ORACLE features a performance by Udo Kasemets. It will premiere at Vtape on Saturday October 1, 2011, 3-5pm with a conversation between the artist and Kasemets at 3pm.

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The exhibition runs from September 17^th to October 14^th 2011.

401 Richmond St., #452

Toronto, ON M5V 3A8

416 351-1317

Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday 12-4pm

For more information, contact info@vtape.org

www.vtape.org

Please contact Erik Martinson at Vtape to book class visits to view any Vtape Video Gallery program as well as other titles in the Vtape holdings and to have an orientation to Vtape and all the extensive research facilities available to students, curators, writers and the general public.

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