Events & Gatherings
Community Screening: The Great Thaw
This free Community Screening is part of A Topographical Summit (ATS): a gathering of artists, filmmakers, designers, scientists and scholars hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections and the School For The Arts.
Sunday, October 5, 1 PM
Film: The Great Thaw
Director: Michaela Grill & Karl Lemieux
Year: 2024
Runtime: 46 minutes
Country: Canada & Austria
Rating: N/A
The Great Thaw is an experiment in documentary filmmaking and a foray into scientific communication. Collaborating with scientific researchers, the filmmakers shift between relaying facts and creating an experience of those facts, allowing the spectator to feel environmental changes and sense physical transformations. The interplay of analogue and digital imagery (the media of choice of directors Lemieux and Grill, respectively), combined with the intricately composed soundtrack and the oscillation between abstraction and figuration, opens a space for embodied understandings and the fluid movement of thought. Avoiding the didactic, the film nonetheless wills us to confront reality.
The Great Thaw is a project about permafrost thaw and how landscape is changed by it. The film takes a close look at ecosystems like the boreal forest, the tundra and the arctic coastline to document the impacts of the melting permafrost caused by climate change and to present the beauty of permafrost itself. After Antarctic Traces, The Great Thaw is a new part of the Ecological Grief Series which focuses on different aspects of human interaction with nature in the Anthropocene. The series investigates environmental melancholia and the loss of places, species and ecosystems.
Event/Exhibition meta autogenerated block.
When
October 5 at 1:00PM–3:00PM
Where
SaskTel Theatre
October 5 at 1:00PM – 3:00PM
Director Bios:
Michaela Grill studied in Vienna, Glasgow and London (Goldsmith College) and has worked on various film and video works, installations and live visuals since 1999. Performance and screening venues include MOMA NY, National Gallery of Art Washington, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, La Casa Encendida Barcelona, ICA London and many cinematheques. Her videos have been screened at over 200 festivals worldwide and Grill was the recipient of the Outstanding Artist Award by the Austrian Ministry of Art & Culture in 2010.
Karl Lemieux is a filmmaker, whose work is inspired by the dialogue that occurs between film, music and sound art. At the heart of his practice, also including narrative filmmaking, the importance of the cinematographic apparatus and the attachment to celluloid are essential. His films, installations, and performances have screened internationally in museums, galleries, music venues and film festivals including: the Montreal Contemporary Arts Museum, the MOMA – Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. He is known for his collaboration with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a Montreal music collective for which he has done over 400 live 16mm film projection performances since 2010. He is also the co-founder of the Double Negative, a Montreal-based collective, dedicated to the production and dissemination of experimental films. His first feature film, Maudite Poutine (Shambles), premiered in the Orizzonti competition of the 73rd Venice International Film Festival organized by the Venice Biennale
Both Lemieux and Grill are Woodwell Climate Research Center Art-Science Fellows for 2024-26.
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ATS brings together an ecology of practices in performance, moving images, visual arts and natural sciences that are invested in the capacity for social change through artist-led activity. Using topography as an anchoring concept, contributors will engage in discourse that conceives of ecological crisis as a product of the Western colonial modernist project and, therefore, as a condition that must be addressed through worldviews and epistemologies that are antithetical to the project’s manifestations. The contributors’ practices mark distinct turns away from techno-liberalism and individuation that provide examples of how we might lessen our compulsion to act like modern individuals, in favour of an ethics of inter-existence. They engage multiple modalities and speculative fictions in critique of the techno-rational approach to ecological crisis and show how art might provide the affective frameworks for reconfiguring our response to the complex after-effects of the modernist project.