Tactical Media? Small-file Media in Stages of Siege and Infrastructural Precarity

23 October (Monday), Tactical Media Hybrid Panel

General: A hybrid panel of speakers, including Radek Przedpełski and Mena (in person), and Razan and Rom (online). Attendees will join in-person as well as through the Zoom meeting. 

Date and time: 10am-12 PST on 23 October 2023

Venue: The Cinematheque, 1131 Howe St, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2K8.

Title: Tactical Media? Small-file Media in Stages of Siege and Infrastructural Precarity

Brief: Expanding on David Garcia and Geert Lovink’s notion of “tactical media” and Laura U. Marks’ notion of the “Arab glitch,” this hybrid panel hosted by The Cinematheque at 10am PST on October 23, 2023 will discuss small-file media in states of siege and infrastructural precarity. Our invited speakers will consider the larger issues and techniques of media art activism in current zones of conflict, as well as possibilities of collaboration between independent artists and researchers around the world. The panellists will include Egyptian filmmaker Mena El Shazly, Palestinian filmmaker Razan AlSalah, as well as visual artists Ksenia Mirgorodska and Gleb Dovzhuk—members of the UKRAiNATV collective. The panel will be hosted by visual artist/scholar Radek Przedpełski.

 Zoom meeting details: 

Topic: SFMF Tactical Media Panel
Time: Oct 23, 2023 10:00 AM Vancouver
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82565008893?

Meeting ID: 825 6500 8893
Passcode: 669523

Format: a 2-hour hybrid panel. The idea would be for each of the member to deliver a short, 15-20 minutes, presentation on their artistic work followed by a discussion. 

Mena El Shazly is a time-based media artist whose practice is concerned with light-sensitive surfaces, entropy, archival bodies and sites of memory. She is completing an MFA at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, studied performing and visual arts at the American University in Cairo, and was a fellow of the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Her work has been showcased at venues including Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo), VIVO Media Arts (Vancouver) and House of The World Cultures (Berlin). She is the Artistic Director of the Cairo Video Festival organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art.

Photo courtesy of artist Marwan Elgamal.—–

Based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds. Her work has shown at community-based and international film festivals & galleries including Art of the Real, Prismatic Ground, RIDM, HotDocs, Yebisu, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art and Sursock Museum. Razan teaches film and media arts at the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.

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UKRAiNATV emerged at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and created a live-streaming collective uniting art, activism and technology. StreamArtStudio broadcast live from its gateway Krakow and created a hub for war-displaced refugees. They quickly became a multiplatform outlet for young voices that remain unheard in traditional media. A few months later, the war began. UKRAiNATV is an open collective and internet TV station that provides guidance and hybrid production forms to artists, activists, researchers and media freaks from Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Italy and beyond. The station prioritizes refugees, expats, migrants and other persons in need, helping them to express themselves outside of state control and seek out new, experimentally-minded opportunities.