The Story of Telling

Tirtza Even Artist Talk

Friday, February 17, 2012
1:00 – 3:00 pm
Hexagram Resource Centre
EV Building, 11.705
Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine St. W.

Event co-sponsored by CEREV.

Tirtza Even’s presentation, “The Story of Telling,” will review her efforts to communicate social and political realities in visual media. Even’s linear and interactive video work have consistently been engaged with representing the encounter with a variety of groups and individuals, typically ones whose lives embody complex or decentralized social/political settings (in Palestine, Turkey, the U.S and Germany, among other locations).  At the same time (and perhaps especially) the work could also be described as an exploration of the inevitable, yet nuanced, failure of this very act of representation.

Even’s most recent projects include Natural Life (a feature length documentary on incarcerated youth, in progress, 2011), Failed (a multi-channel video installation, in progress, 2011), All Day (a short
experimental documentary made in collaboration with an inmate locked for life at a Michigan State prison, 2012), and Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains (a multi-channel video/ 3-D animation reflecting on personal encounters in Palestine, 2009).

Bio
A practicing video artist and documentary maker for more than ten years, Even has produced both linear and interactive video work representing the less overt manifestations of complex and sometimes extreme social/political dynamics in specific locations. Her work has appeared at the Modern Art Museum, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many other venues in, the United States, Israel and Europe, and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Modern Art Museum (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others.  She has been an invited guest and featured speaker at numerous conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia, The Performance Studies International conference (PSI), The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference (SLSA) and others.

Currently an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Even has been teaching Video and Multimedia Production and Post-Production, Experimental and Documentary Film Theory, Video Art and Media Theory and Production at the School of Art & Design, the University of Michigan, at New York University, at Columbia University, NY and at a number of other colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, and has published articles about video art history and theory in Israel and the United States. A Fulbright scholar, she completed a Masters Degree in Cinema Studies (with a focus on Documentary and Ethnographic Film Production and Theory) and a second Masters in the Interactive Telecommunication Program, both at New York University.

Artist Talk Supported by: Department of Design and Computation Arts, Open Media / IMCA MFA, SAVAP, CEREV and Hexagram.

Center for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence