St. Lawrence University: Festival of the Arts

Saturday, February 24, 3:00 p.m. The Underground

At the Flow / Floe Edge: Igloolik Video

Film and video screening with commentary by Peggy Gale

Nanook of the North,
Robert J. Flaherty, 1922

For my presentation, I will concentrate on the works of Igloolik Isuma Productions and show excerpts from Nunavut (Our Land), a series of thirteen interrelated half-hour episodes which trace the activities of five fictional Inuit families in 1945 living a traditional life on the land ten years before they were moved to permanent settlements. Among other titles, I will feature Stone House, Ice Blocks, and Seal Pups. Two longer works, Qaggiq (Meeting Place) (1989) and Nunaqpa (Going Inland) (1991) by Zacharias Kunuk, will also be excerpted. I will discuss these films for their innovative formal qualities, and also in the context of their collaborative mode of 'self-representation' aimed at maintaining memory and tradition. - PG

Tulangisi (Seal Pups)
from Nunavut, Iglooik
Isuma Productions, 1995

For more than twenty years, Peggy Gale has been an independent curator and writer specializing in media-related and time-based works by contemporary artists. In 1989, she presented Electronic Landscapes at the National Gallery of Canada and was commissioner for the Third International Video Biennale in Fukui City, Japan. Gale was a member of the curatorial group for the first Biennale of the Moving Image at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 1990, and co-curator of the exhibition Northern Lights at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo in 1991.

Tugaliak (Ice Blocks)
from Nunavut, Iglooik
Isuma Productions, 1995

For TV Ontario in 1994, Gale was curator and on-screen host for Video Art Video, a ten-program series by Canadian artists; later the same year, she was a jury member for the 40th International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany. In October 1998, she presented Igloolik Video: A Clear Light at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains, in France, which was revised as Icelight for the Oakville Galleries in Ontario from July to September 2000. Gale has published extensively since the mid-1970s. She has edited three books in Art Metropole's By Artists series and has contributed essays to Performance and Multi-Disciplinarity: Post-Modernist Video by Artists and Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, among others. Last fall, Gale was honored with a Toronto Arts Award for Visual Arts.

Tugaliak (Ice Blocks)
from Nunavut, Iglooik
Isuma Productions, 1995