Vidéographe is pleased to announce that the first recipient of the Robert-Forget Award is artist, author, and curator Anne Golden!

The jury, composed of Nicole Gingras, Pierre Hébert, and Paul Wong, selected her for her unique contribution to the discipline and to the video community. Anne Golden will receive the award at a dedicated ceremony on February 22, 2022, at the Cinéma Moderne. The evening will feature a screening of Anne Golden’s work, programmed by Anne Golden herself, offering a retrospective and introspective perspective on her prolific and sustained output over the past thirty years.

“This program foregrounds several obsessions of mine. Some of the obsessions will be palpable to viewers; abandoned spaces, fictitious histories, obsolete technologies and hauntings. I also obsessed over this selection of works. This video or that one? In chronological order or by theme? Choosing from over seventy works made since 1991 had me pondering that there could be infinite possible alternate programs, each one flawed. I imagined diverse screening venues showing a selection of works chosen by different versions of myself.

The hauntings in this program are not all clearly apparent. They are eclectic, varied, peculiar and personal. Ghosts are in and of the machine. There are ghosts of the past and of that strange hybrid, the future past. There are digital ghosts and analog ones. There are metaphoric hauntings and actual ones. The works in this program contain ghostly images shot on Video 8, Hi8, Super 8 and MiniDV. Obsolete editing processes produced some of the images and sounds. There are borrowed images, too, which bring their own haunted auras. Archives, sometimes personal, sometimes borrowed, are used to present dead formats, that is, means of production no longer in use. The videos in this program feature some younger iterations of me and my friends and collaborators. Of course there is a final obsession: what has been left out. The videos that are not here haunt, too.

And then, yet another obsession: curating as a kind of incantation. Curating is not a science but it is sometimes a type of alchemy. Select media artworks. Champion the selections in your program. Contextualize them. Be kind to the works by placing them exactly where they belong. Don’t crowd the videos. Don’t drown them. I have long been captivated by the idea of transmission. Is something beyond the content of the works in the program being imparted? I suspect that something happens when images float off the screen, break into particles, and mix with viewer’s sensations and perceptions.”

– Anne Golden, 2022

PROGRAM

• BROTHERS, 1998, 6 min
• SITE, 2020, 2 min
• NIGHTTIDE, 2017, 1 min 41 s
• INFIRMARY, 2017, 2 min 36 s
• PIECES, 2016, 1 min 29 s
• THE ROOMS, 2020, 2 min 37 s
• THE EXPERIMENT, 2020, 3 min 42 s
• SPECKS, 2020, 1 min 59 s
• THE EVENT, 2020, 3 min 41 s
• THE ORDER, 2020, 3 min 54 s
• POTION, 2017, 1 min
• PLay Land, 2020, 2 min 29 s
• VISTA, 2020, 2 min 58 s
• SHARDS, 2021, 2 min 39 s
• AT SEA, 2021, 3 min 25 s
• THE COMMUTER, 2020, 3 min 31 s

BIOGRAPHY 

A leading figure in the independent video community, Anne Golden has contributed to the recognition of the video discipline and of feminist and lesbian perspectives by supporting their circulation to various groups. She is the artistic director of Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) and teaches in the Media Arts department of John Abbott College. The director has facilitated the emergence and circulation of new perspectives on video art, while contributing to the growth of the medium with a production that spans over 30 years. Anne Golden’s work has successfully circulated in numerous festivals, galleries, and museums in Québec, Canada, and internationally. The artist herself has participated in several presentations on curatorial practices, independent distribution, and, more recently, horror films.

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