Meridian Gallery in Partnership with the Armenian Film Festival presents
An Evening of Experimental Films

Friday, November 10, 7:30 PM

$15 general; $7 students

Meridian Gallery is pleased to present, in partnership with the Armenian Film Festival, an evening of experimental films by women, including a special preview of Stone, Time, Touch, a new film by Gariné Torossian. Pinched Cheeks and Slurs in a Language That Avoids Her, a film by Tina Bastajian, will be co-presented by Frameline. Proceeds will benefit Meridian Gallery's upcoming move to a new space after 20 years at 545 Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco.

STONE, TIME, TOUCH
Directed by Gariné Torossian
Canada, 70 min., 2006, In Armenian with English subtitles

Stone, Time, Touch separates, assembles and layers the details that construct the fundamental truths of Armenia and Armenian identity, both large and intimate. At its core is the complex identity of the Diaspora with a land driven by history and reconstructed by the dispossessed and absent into an impossibly ideal, and yet emotionally central and defining internal presence. The film treats honestly and without judgment the present realities of Armenia and the voids that separate the constructed from the real. A character emerges that is at once engaged with the present - lively, magical, and hard; yet powerfully spiritual, wounded and embedded in history.

The film elegantly weaves a density of temporal orders and visually textural effects, and is structured around the twin narratives of an odyssey in the immediate present and of recollection. There is an intimate physical tactility and presence that actively advance and layer the personal engagement to time and history that emerges as a fundamental condition of Armenian-ness - and one that is necessarily engaged through physical contact. Metaphors are subtly sculpted and referenced to one another in a deeply engaging and resonant weave of ideas. The touch of hand to arm, of hands clasped, somehow are transformed into fundamental statements of profound emotional power.

PINCHED CHEEKS AND SLURS IN A LANGUAGE THAT AVOIDS HER
Directed by Tina Bastajian
USA, 10 min, 1994, In English and Armenian with English subtitles

A triangulation of themes, positing layers of a monologue, mirrored images and a conversation heard and overheard. A questioning of belonging, to a culture and language that is both familiar and alien. The ambiguous background chatter in Armenian questions a woman's presence because of the color of her skin. An ironic twist challenges racial slurs with the mystery and wisdom embodied in the making of Armenian coffee, and the reading of the coffee grounds.

"Simply told, Pinched Cheeks is an effective work that speaks loudly of cultural biases." (Lea Russo- Los Angeles View, April 1996)

"A brilliant short film…" (David Kazanjian, Armenian Forum 3, no. 1, 2003)

Co-presented by Frameline.

ZeroPointTwo
Thea Farhadian & Heike Liss
USA, 19 min., 2005, silent

ZeroPointTwo, a video collaboration between Armenian-American sound artist Thea Farhadian and German visual artist Heike Liss presents a poetic and simultaneously disturbing account of a woman having her head shaved. Filmed in real time, the work moves between states of the ordinary consciousness and the metaphoric, cultural, and historical understandings of the subject within the mind of the viewer.

BIOS:

Tina Bastajian is an award-winning filmmaker who has exhibited internationally at festivals, galleries and museums, including: the San Francisco International Film Festival; ArteEast-CinemaEast, NYC; The Arsenal, Metz; The Armenian National Cinémathèque, Yerevan; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; The Museum of Flying, Los Angeles; The Amos Anderson Museum, Helsinki; Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; The First World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies Film Festival, Mainz; YYZ Gallery, Toronto and the Beirut International Film Festival. Her recent video essay Garden Dwelling was featured in a survey of her work entitled, Notions of Otherness: Between the Frame, the Margin and the Translation, at the Elvehjem Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a recipient of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) scholarship to attend the University of Amsterdam where she is researching film/video preservation and archival issues that pertain to the moving image, and is developing a DVD project and film programme for the Netherlands Filmmuseum focusing on Amsterdam's 1970's underground film phenomenon "Electric Cinema". Currently she is exploring locative and mobile technologies for creating annotated cinema projects.

Thea Farhadian is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in the Bay Area. She studied Arabic classical music in New York City and in Cairo, holds an MA from San Francisco State in Interdisciplinary Arts and is currently completing her MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College. Her work has been seen internationally at venues which include the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Kachaturyan Museum in Yerevan, Armenia, the Alternative Museum in New York City, Raumschiff Zitrone in Berlin, and International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project in Amsterdam and Los Angeles. In 2002, she co-founded the Armenian Film Festival in New York City and currently is one of the curators for the film festival in San Francisco.

Heike Liss was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. She studied Ethnology, and Social Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. In 2002 she received her Master of Fine Arts from Mills College. Her work has been shown in Europe and Canada, as well as in North and South America and she is the recipient of a 2001 Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowship (San Francisco), as well as a 2002 Fellowship at The Photography Institute (New York City). She currently works in video, photography and site-specific installation and public intervention projects. She also acts as a curator, most recently for the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg and The Lab, San Francisco. Heike Liss lives in California and Germany with her husband and their children.

Gariné Torossian, born in Lebanon of Armenian origin, is a self-taught filmmaker and photographer. Mining a rich palette of colors and textures, superimpositions and dissolves, she creates stunningly sophisticated films that bridge the gaps between visual, sound art, cinema and the rock video. Eighteen of her films have shown internationally at festivals. Retrospectives of her work include New York's Museum of Modern Art, Stan Brakhage's first person cinema, Yerevan Cinematheque, Berlin Arsenal, and Telluride Festival. She's been awarded prizes and mentions at Berlin, Melbourne and Houston film festivals.