Future Projections Introduction

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2008

Last year, the Festival launched the Future Projections programme. It joined an increasing number of ventures worldwide seeking commonality between the film and visual-arts communities. As an organization, we elected to devote serious curatorial resources to the project because we are convinced that these two cultural forms are increasingly intertwined and that we have much to learn from one another. This commitment informs our plans for Bell Lightbox, our organization’s new home, now being built at King and John Streets; its five exquisite cinemas are set beside several formal and informal gallery spaces, thus providing a working model for interdisciplinary conversations.

In its first year, Future Projections sought to investigate various areas of collaboration between moving-picture art forms. Joining traditional installations were interactive cinema, video game imagery and other experiments in the space between film and visual art. Through a series of essays, we also made explicit connections to the rest of the Festival and, particularly, to Wavelengths, our treasured home for artist-made films. An exciting success, the inaugural Future Projections devoted attention to visual artists working in under-recognized fields and brought to light curatorial issues that are slowly being explored worldwide.

This time around, the programmers participating in Future Projections all gravitated to a more defined, somewhat narrower curatorial pathway. Although no one imposed any rules, each of us was drawn to more explicitly installation-based work with clear connections to the history and culture of cinema. This focus has strengthened our initial thesis—or, more to the point, hunch—that artists are re-engineering film in a way that can inspire us about film creation to come, remind us of cinema’s great legacy, and inform how we watch films today.

Future Projections continues the remarkable city-wide collaboration that made our first time around such a success. We are humbled by our generous and inventive collaborators on this project, including the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Stephen Bulger Gallery/CAMERA, Craig Scott Gallery, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and our longtime friends at the Drake Hotel. We also acknowledge our financial support from the Jackman Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council for this and so many other crucial art projects. It is a remarkable sign of the newfound cultural confidence in this city that such a range of institutions can find the energy and aptitude for a project of this scope.

Future Projections 2008 draws its participants from strikingly diverse sources. Well-known visual artists Glenn Ligon and Margaux Williamson share space on the programme with emerging talent like Samuel Chow, multidisciplinary artists Clive Holden and Marco Brambilla, and established film directors Srinivas Krishna and Philip Haas, who are approaching the gallery for the first time. The contrasts among and inspired connections between each of the works and the rest of the Festival should prove exciting and powerful for all who join us.
—Noah Cowan