Mike Hoolboom

21-11-2005

The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts is proud to present the works of Mike Hoolboom:

Panic Bodies (1998, 70 min)
Tom (2002, 75 min)
Imitations of Life(2003, 75 min )
Public Lighting (2004, 76 min)

All works available for screenings and exhibitions on beta sp pal and DVD. For information about distribution contact the distribution staff.


Mike Hoolboom (Toronto, 1959) is a Canadian filmmaker who since the 1990s has received an international reputation within the fringe media world for his extensive and varied oeuvre. For years Hoolboom worked on 16mm film (of which most have been destroyed) and switched to video in 2000.


His films often contain an enormous amount of processed film and video images that we may or may not know from our collective, virtual archive of images that is daily supplied and corroded by film and television. The work of Hoolboom seems to engage a battle with the overproduction of images as well as their vanishing. Production and memory form a recurring theme in his movies, along with the body, desire, illness and loss.

Politics, personal philosophy and experience, quotations and writerly texts, images that come from everywhere, abstractions as well as intimate portraits, are fluently and playfully interwoven.

In the 1980s Hoolboom distributed fringe films for the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Between 2000-2001 he was the artistic director of the Images Festival in Toronto. He has published two books, Plague Years (1998 YYZ Books) and Inside the Pleasure Dome (2001, Coach House Press) and written over 200 articles about film and video in various magazines, catalogues and publications. A 4 channel installation, The Invisible Man (2004) was exhibited at AGYU gallery, Toronto, at The Public Art Gallery of Windsor and at LMAK Projects in New York. Retrospectives of Hoolboom's work have been shown at Cinema De Balie (Amsterdam, Holland), Impakt Festival (Utrecht, Holland), Sixpack (Austria), Mediawave (Hungary), Documentary Festival Jihlava (Czech Republic), Vila do Conde Short Film Festival (Portugal) and Visions du Real (Nyon, Switzerland). Over the course of the last ten years Hoolboom received over thirty prizes, among them the Toronto Award for the Media Arts.

Hoolboom is currently working on a personal documentary about the Canadian filmmaker and performer Colin Campbell. A movie which, like Tom, is not only about this artist, but also about us, and our recent history (like the cold war). There is always this cinematographic or TV stage from which memory addresses us, and we always have to make a choice: looking or not looking; to remember or to forget.

'Our movies mark the passage of time. They are time machines, machines built for mourning and in some moments they are much of what stands between us and our need to obliterate everything, our need to begin again, to wipe the slate clean. There are two kinds of terror here, the terror of annihilation and the terror of remembering. Which will we find more painful? Or more seductive?'
(Imitations of Life)

Text and translation: Esma Moukhtar