Menu
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

Search Results

← All events

Thursday, 14 Nov 2024 at 6 pm

The Norm Theatre, UBC Life Building, Room 130, 6138 Student Union Boulevard

Film Screening: Fresh Kill and Crimes of The Future

  • Shu Lea Cheang

    Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre bending gender hacking art practices. She drafts sci-fi narratives in film scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interface with transgressive plots and open network that permits public participation. Celebrated as a net art pioneer with BRANDON (1998 – 1999), the first web art commissioned and collected by Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cheang represented Taiwan with mixed media installation, 3x3x6, at Venice Biennale 2019. Crafting her own genre of Scifi New Queer Cinema, she has made 4 feature films, FRESH KILL(1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2024, she receives the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. She is currently at work for two major shows in 2025 – HAGAY DREAMING, a theatre performance for Tate Modern and a survey show at Haus der Kunst in Munich.

    Read More

  • Weiyi Chang

    Weiyi Chang is a writer and curator based in Toronto. Currently the 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence at Gallery 44, Chang’s research centres around the nexus between the cultural, social, economic, and political forces that sanction ecological violence, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Her writing has been widely published and she has curated projects in Canada, Germany, and the United States. Chang was a 2019-20 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She holds a MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia.

     

    Read More

In collaboration with the UBC Film Society, please join us for a screening of Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill (1994) and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022). This double bill is free for all!

Presented alongside the exhibition, An Opulence of Squander and currently on view at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until December 8, 2024, this screening series brings together films that explore the devastation of environmental decay and its effect on bodies, families, communities and societies. Together, both films critique notions of excess, waste and the toxic repercussions of unfettered growth.

Fresh Kill (1994, 35 mm) is an eco-cybernoia that envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in a high-tech commodity culture. Fresh Kill tells the story of two young lesbian parents caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. Raw fish lips are all the rage on trendy menus across Manhattan. A ghost barge, bearing nuclear refuse, circles the planet in search of a willing port. Household pets start to glow ominously and then disappear altogether. The sky opens up and snows soap flakes. People start speaking in dangerous tongues. A riveting and densely packed film, Fresh Kill evokes the furious rhythms of channel surfing with its rapid-fire editing style.

Crimes of the Future (2022) is a futuristic body horror that envisions the consequences of our synthetic environment on human evolution. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser is a celebrity performance artist who publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances supported by high-tech devices manufactured by the mysterious LifeFormWave company. Facing unprecedented pressure from an increasingly toxic environment, Tenser’s body is undergoing rapid evolutionary change that threatens to upend social, political and economic structures. His evolution draws the attention of staff at the National Organ Registry, a government agency charged with tracking and monitoring human evolution, as well as a mysterious underground group that aims to accelerate human development.

Crimes of the Future will begin at 6 pm, followed by Fresh Kill at 8 pm.

This program is co-presented by the Belkin and UBC Film Society.

 

Watch the Fresh Kill trailer

Watch the Crimes of the Future trailer

  • Shu Lea Cheang

    Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre bending gender hacking art practices. She drafts sci-fi narratives in film scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interface with transgressive plots and open network that permits public participation. Celebrated as a net art pioneer with BRANDON (1998 – 1999), the first web art commissioned and collected by Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cheang represented Taiwan with mixed media installation, 3x3x6, at Venice Biennale 2019. Crafting her own genre of Scifi New Queer Cinema, she has made 4 feature films, FRESH KILL(1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2024, she receives the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. She is currently at work for two major shows in 2025 – HAGAY DREAMING, a theatre performance for Tate Modern and a survey show at Haus der Kunst in Munich.

    Read More

  • Weiyi Chang

    Weiyi Chang is a writer and curator based in Toronto. Currently the 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence at Gallery 44, Chang’s research centres around the nexus between the cultural, social, economic, and political forces that sanction ecological violence, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Her writing has been widely published and she has curated projects in Canada, Germany, and the United States. Chang was a 2019-20 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She holds a MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia.

     

    Read More

Related