Emilie Serri
The Space Between the Seconds
Originally from Montreal, Émilie Serri is a filmmaker, songwriter and visual artist. After studying journalism, she graduated in cinema from Concordia University. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her films are structured in the form of visual poems and are distinct due to their rich and personalized sonic universe. Distributed by the experimental cinema company Light Cone in Paris, her work has circulated throughout many festivals both nationally and internationally (France, Switzerland, Greece). Her video installations have been shown in galleries and artist-run centres in Québec and across Canada. In 2012, she received the York University Award for Best Student Film at the Toronto Images Festival.
Meeting balances wandering. A crossroad of two othernesses, it welcomes the foreigner without tying him down, opening the host to his visitor without committing him. A mutual recognition, the meeting owes its success to its temporary nature […].
—Julia Kristeva
Galerie B-312 is pleased to present Emilie Serri’s latest exhibition The Space Between the Seconds, which brings together three video installations rooted in the artist’s questions about her Syrian origins. How to register a kinship with one’s culture in the absence of direct references? How to embrace one’s origins at a time when war makes field research difficult, if not impossible? How to identify with a memory through the experiences and histories of the other? Émile Serri addresses these questions through the notions of otherness, disappearance, and memory interacting with history — intimate and collective. Structured from personal documents and films found on the Web, her work converges together reality and fiction. The video installation serves as writing. It creates stories, History. Through the juxtaposition of sequences, Émilie Serri’s video questions the underlying psychological, social and political dimensions from the angle of "familiar elsewhere". For instance, the work R0G255B0 appears as a monolithic green screen and acts as a backdrop to these identity apprehensions where it is conceivable to hope for all possibilities. It suggests a presence by its imposing form and its soundtrack narrating an experience of Syria, but also a disappearance by its technical possibilities of inlay. It is also an opportunity, for Émilie Serri, to comment on the circulation, the production and the veracity of images.
– ISABELLE GUIMOND
1. The green screen allows special effects of inlay due to a high contrast with the human figure.
Originally from Montreal, Émilie Serri is a filmmaker, songwriter and visual artist. After studying journalism, she graduated in cinema from Concordia University. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her films are structured in the form of visual poems and are distinct due to their rich and personalized sonic universe. Distributed by the experimental cinema company Light Cone in Paris, her work has circulated throughout many festivals both nationally and internationally (France, Switzerland, Greece). Her video installations have been shown in galleries and artist-run centres in Québec and across Canada. In 2012, she received the York University Award for Best Student Film at the Toronto Images Festival.