Gather for group screening of short, experimental films navigating cybernetic realities, curated by Dhvani Ramanujam, with works selected from the Winnipeg Film Group catalogue.

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This group screening of short, experimental films from the Winnipeg Film Group (WFG), presented by Sari Sari Xchange foregrounds the perspective of a cyborg not as an object of our gaze, but as a curious viewer. We invite you to look at these films through the lens of an illicit cyborg wandering through the digital debris of the WFG’s collection, stumbling to locate herself in a place she doesn’t quite belong. In her uncovering, what does the cyborg see, and what does she desire from moving images that reflect moving bodies and dreaming minds different from her own? Tactile scenes of the act of dressing oneself, skipping rope, knotting one’s hair, clicking computer keys, throbbing to pulsing music in a crowd, lifting weights in a gym— fascinate the cyborg. Just as a longing for a posthuman body preoccupies the human, the films included in this program illuminate a reversal: a lone cyborg’s yearning—and failure— to stage any ‘clean’ return to a ‘real’ body or community. These are films replete with: the mechanized contours of shapeshifting bodies, and the physicality of rituals and labour laced with strange intimacies, a search for communal bonds and self through gesture.

Featuring work by Leslie Supnet, Ian Bawa, Sadaf Foroughi, Angeline Javier, Sunny Sidhu, and Isiah Medina.

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Dhvani Ramanujam is a curator and writer currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Interested in archives, aesthetics, and poetics of gesture, her dissertation explores queer, feminist, and decolonial curatorial methods for reactivating marginalized film histories. Her writing has appeared in C Magazine, Public Parking, BlackFlash Magazine, the anthology collection Imagining Futures of Experimental Media, and Performance Research. Dhvani is a board member of the8fest Small-Gauge Film Festival; a member of TRIPTYCH, a Toronto-based curatorial collective; and curator of Film Notes, a scent-based screening series pairing perfume with film.‍

The Winnipeg Film Group is an artist-run education, production support, exhibition, and distribution centre committed to advancing the art of the moving image. WFG aspires to be a world-class film centre in Manitoba that supports filmmakers, engages the community and expands the appreciation of independent cinema.‍

Sari Sari Xchange (SSX) is a community-building research & creation project using Extended Reality (XR) (ie. Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Realities) to foster new works by artists from the Asian diaspora.

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