MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC | CINEMA CHEZ LES BALANTES
THURSDAY 10 APRIL-SATURDAY 26 APRIL 2014
OPENING RECEPTION
SATURDAY 12 APRIL 2014, 2:00PM TO 5:00PM
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Images Festival.
ARTIST TALK
MONDAY 14 APRIL AT 3:00PM
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc will give a talk at the Images Mediatheque (Urban Space Gallery at 401 Richmond Street West).
Des Fusils pour Banta (Guns for Banta) was to be the first feature film by Sarah Maldoror, a French filmmaker of Guadeloupean descent who was a pioneering voice in the production of anti-colonialist films in Lusophone Africa in the 1960s and 70s. Des Fusils pour Banta was commissioned by the Algerian government, which hoped to use it as a propaganda tool for the independence struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Before its completion, the film was confiscated by the Algerian government because of Maldoror’s insistence on retaining full control over its final edit. As a result, the film never saw the light of day.
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s archival, research-based project uses this lost film to explore the production of images in the context of a revolutionary moment, and the subsequent recirculation and function of those images in the present. At the centre of this exhibition is Foreward to Guns for Banta, a 35mm slide projection which uses photographs from the film’s production with an audio montage composed from conversations between Abonnenc and Maldoror.
The exhibition also includes a series of other print-based elements extending this archival research: a collaboration with the artist Clement Rodzielski consisting of two found and altered Romanian posters for Maldoror’s best-known film, Sambizanga; and a pamphlet which collects the writings of Suzan Lipinska, the photographer who accompanied Maldoror during the shooting of her film.
The Images Festival and YYZ gratefully acknowledge the support of the Consulate General of France for this exhibition.
MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC was born in 1977 in Paris (French Guyana), he lives and works in Metz. His recent solo exhibition includes Songs for a Mad King at Kunsthalle-Basel, Switzerland and Kannibalen, at Kunstverein-Bielefeld, Germany. In 2012, two institutions, the Serralves Foundation (Porto, Portugal) and the Pavilion (Leeds, England) mounted solo exhibitions for the artist. Abonnenc recently took part in the Paris Triennial in the Palais de Tokyo and in group exhibitions (all in 2012) in the Fondation dentreprise Ricard (Paris), as well as at the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, USA).
