Revisiting In Visible Colours: An International Women of Colour and Third World Women Film/Video Festival and Symposium (1989)
Program Curators: Ana Valine and Roya Akbari
Decolonial Feminist Praxis in 1980s Experimental Video Art
Curatorial Essay by Roya Akbari
The original catalogue of In Visible Colours, published in 1989, positions women of colour at the intersection of race, class, and gender, as they “bear the burden and brutality of these triple forces of oppression, perpetuated by patriarchy and colonialism” (Jiwani 1989, n.p.). Decades later, as Zainub Verjee posits,
“[h]aving established the coherent narrative of IVC, it now becomes possible to open up new lines of inquiries into IVC and its legacy”
(Verjee 2019, 425).
For this educational guide to carry forward IVC’s legacy, we curated a program of films and videos from the original collection of IVC 1989 that employ a decolonial feminist framework, which is rooted in anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. The selections all aim to challenge the violence of the settler-colonial state by generating dialogue on issues of gender, decoloniality, and Indigenous people’s rights.
These experimental works speak to each other across different places and temporalities—from Turtle Island (North America) to the Global South. Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988) addresses the themes of colonization, genocide, dispossession, and displacement in the context of Palestine. Ruby Truly’s …And the Word Was God (1987) focuses on the ongoing effects of colonisation across Canada. Shu Lea Cheang’s satirical Color Schemes (1989) functions as a critique of liberal multiculturalism in the United States. All of these works, therefore, act as feminist interventions that recount the ways in which settler-colonialism was and continues to be experienced by Indigenous, Palestinian, Black, and racialized diasporic bodies.
These works also account for the ways in which these communities have historically resisted the dominant cultures of their colonizers. Color Schemes, for instance, debunks the neoliberal assertion that colonization is a thing of the past, while …And the Word Was God similarly reflects on the brutality of assimilation as a violent settler-colonial project. Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance recounts the intimate correspondence between a mother and daughter, who were forced into a double exile: first, as result of the 1948 Nakba, the family was displaced from Palestine and relocated to Lebanon. Then, in 1975, while visiting London, Hatoum herself became exiled; war broke out in Lebanon, and she stayed in England.
Women, Art, and the Periphery & Latin American Video Art in the VIVO Media Arts Centre Archives
Program Curator: Roya Akbari
A Living Archive of Diaspora: Women’s Bodies as Sites of Resistance
Curatorial Essay by Roya Akbari
“In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures”
– Gloria Anzaldúa
According to Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), the borderland is a site of multiple oppressions, struggle, alienation, and hybrid identity. It is a liminal space, a site of in-between-ness, a perpetual state of non-belonging. Borderlands are geographical but also metaphorical. They are places where women of colour’s embodied experiences, along with their shared struggle toward liberation, become the basis for resistance to and refusal of the multiple systems of power and oppression that intersect with capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy (Anzaldúa 1987). Today, as social movements have proliferated, such an intersectional analysis has become commonplace. It has been felt, for instance, in contemporary Chilean feminist movements such as Un violador en tu camino (“A rapist in your path”) which denounced rape culture and patriarchy and found echoes around the world. Already in the 1980s, however, Women, Art & the Periphery (WAP) employed an intersectional framework to deliver anti-fascist and anti-capitalist feminist messages.
In addition to being revolutionarily intersectional, WAP also documented women Chilean artists who explored the potential of yet another revolutionary tool, video, to challenge the male-dominated artworld as well as the traditional archive (Shtromberg and Philips 2023, 8). As Sepúlveda (2023) writes, these artists
“developed an audio-visual language to challenge stereotypical gender representations in media while simultaneously reinscribing the female body as both a site of violence and political articulation as a response to military dictatorships” (111).
In this curatorial essay, I approach Women, Art and the Periphery & Latin American Video Art through the embodied experiences of Chilean artist-activist women in the 1980s during the time of Pinochet’s military dictatorship and those of a new generation of Latin American artists located on Coast Salish territory (Vancouver). A series of underlying related themes runs through the five short videos featured in this guide: women’s bodies as sites of resistance, gendered and military violence imposed on women’s bodies and the toll that Chile’s hostile environment took on these bodies, transgressing the boundaries of normative female desire, and diasporic identities.