Using abstraction, animation, and re-enactments, Toronto-based artist Jean-Paul Kelly — the 2014 recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award for “artistic excellence in the moving image” at the New York Film Festival — has created a powerful series of short videos that examine the attractors and repulsors of various forms of media representation. Details from documentaries, press cuttings, publications, and online media streams are isolated, superimposed, composited, and otherwise reconfigured into new meanings — often in disturbing pairings of pleasure and pain, desire and trauma. The centrepiece of the program, Service of the goods, is a shot-by-shot reproduction of scenes from Frederick Wiseman documentaries, which have been stripped of their naturalistic signifiers to bring underlying ideologies into sharper focus. “This film is not only a bang-on piece of filmic analysis; it also poses fundamental questions about the representation of social institutions, and those stuck inside of them” (Michael Sicinski, Keyframe Magazine).

The "characters", "bystanders" and "territories" that shape the world of Valérie Jouve serve as a guideline for this proposal of films conceived as an echo to the exhibition. From one session to another, the stated and autonomous movements of the figures in the architecture or the sea intermingle with anonymous street walkers. Surprised by the camera in their daily crossings, they merge with the city accompanying them or guiding them in their comings and goings. A territory is finally built by the meeting of the body in the film of Ahmed Natche Deux mètres de cette terre before the event takes shape in a fragile space-time which gradually fills up.

A selection of films by Valérie Jouve, Julie Desprairies & Vladimir Léon, Boris Barnet, Jim Jennings, Jem Cohen, Ed van der Elsken, Johan van der Keuken, Ahmad Natche, Mahasen Nasser-Eldin and Claire Denis.