Watch Nocturne (the Story of Sohni and Mehar) and Fear’s Curse (the Story of Mokhi and the Mataras) online.
About Emergents I: Reroots
For the first Emergents project of the 2020/21 season, artists reflect on imagined and speculative folklores. What are the community stories that we tell each other? What kinds of knowledge can we find in our pasts, and pasts that might have been?
The artists represented here each work intimately with folkloric narrative, through music, text, and moving image. In Unwelcome Christmas Greeting, Montreal-based duo Tamayugé (Maya Kuroki and Tamara Filyavich) blend Japanese and Ukrainian traditions into a new electronic storyscape. Meanwhile, masc4masc, Sadie Hochman-Ruiz and Hillary Jean Young’s queercore performance art project, perform a new rendition of Not Another Queer Movie—a long-form performance piece that parodies the early 2000s high school movie canon, and speculates on “a queer adolescence that never was.”
With their multidisciplinary project Reth aur Reghistan, Ontario-based artists Nimra and Manahil Bandukwala interpret the folklore of Sindh, Pakistan through storytelling, poetry, and sculpture. Here, they share two stories—Sohni and Mehar, and Mokhi and the Mataras—alongside poems and artworks inspired by them. Evelyna Ekoko-Kay’s A History of Witches and Terese Mason Pierre’s Circuit revisit diasporic and familial histories to learn ancestral arts left behind, and to make sense of what has haunted them.
Each of these contributors situates their work somewhere between past and future—occupying a liminal space within which a multitude of truths reveal themselves. We hope that this page offers a similar starting point: each video a portal into these artists’ private worlds, as they tell stories inherited, dreamt up, and imagined.