On Film is excited to present the Spring 2017 program “Immigration and displacement,” featuring the works of Emily Hong, Miasarah Lai and Mariangela Mihai as well as Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi.

Utilizing salvaged archival footage and first-person testimony, these works reorient movement and proximity in transforming their visual and aural documents to access the living memories of historical experience. By resurrecting immigration stories from the distant and recent past of humanity and freedom of movement under threat, the urgent cinematic works in this program redefine our understandings of displacement in times of ongoing crisis.

The film as exhibition site is at the centre of this experimental project, both curatorial and cinematographic, by French curator Mathieu Copeland. The exhibition of a film brings together visual artists, filmmakers, musicians, performers, choreographers, and writers around the question “Can an exhibition take place in a film rather than a gallery space?” While working the constraints intrinsic to feature-length film, it aims at being something other than a structuralist “epic”, or a suite of artist’s short films one after the other.