Note: Unfortunately, we have had to cancel Sammy Chien’s performance. Miwa Matreyek’s performance will continue as scheduled at 9:00 pm. Doors will open at 8:00 pm.
Experience VIFF Live Resident Artists Sammy Chien and Miwa Matreyek’s interdisciplinary performances at The Ironworks. One ticket will grant you admission to both performances.
Miwa Matreyek
Further pushing her signature technique of layered projections, Miwa Matreyek creates an emotional, dreamlike meditation on climate catastrophe and the Anthropocene — the proposed current era where human influence has affected almost all realms of earth’s natural systems.
Miwa’s shadow traverses macro and micro scales, as her silhouette shape-shifts to experience the world from various perspectives. An earth overflowing with trash. A person drowning in a plastic-filled ocean. A school of fish caught in a trawling net. The work will be an emotionally impactful, embodied illustration of the news headlines we see everyday, the complex harm humanity causes to the world — and what it might mean for all of us; humanity, as well as other life, and the earth itself — to be living in this changing world.
Matreyek will perform The World Made Itself and Infinitely Yours, works that weave surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between humans, nature, and the climate crisis.
This project is supported by a 2019 Princess Grace Foundation Special Projects Grant. Winner of Golden Nica award for Computer Animation, Prix Ars Electronica 2020. All music for “Infinitely Yours” is composed, recorded and performed by Morgan Sorne.
Sammy Chien
Artistic Director of Chimerik 似不像, Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is an interdisciplinary artist pioneering ways of integrating new media into performance. As part of his practice, Chien uses the technologies of real-time performance software to produce deep connections between image, sound and movement.
Chien will present samples from ongoing research and a new work-in-progress exemplary of a practice that draws upon a composite of art forms, disciplines and lived experiences.
About the Ironworks Series
VIFF Live is giving four Resident Artists the opportunity to immerse themselves in the 2023 Festival and perform at The Ironworks.
Community Partner
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Guests
Miwa Matreyek
Creator, Performer
Miwa Matreyek is an animator, designer, and performer originally based in Los Angeles, now based on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver BC. She has been an internationally touring artist since 2010. Coming from a background in animation, Matreyek creates live, staged performances in which she interacts with her animations as a shadow silhouette at the intersection of cinematic and theatrical, illusionistic and physical, handmade and digital. Her work exists in a dreamlike visual space that makes invisible worlds visible, often weaving surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between humans, nature, and the climate crisis. She is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University at the School for the Contemporary Arts. Previous presentations include TED Global, Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers program, MoMA, SFMoMA, and many more.
Sammy Chien
Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is a Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist-of-colour, who is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, researcher and mentor in film, sound art, new media, performance, movement and spiritual practice. With over 500 collaborative projects, his work has been exhibited across Canada, Western Europe, and Asia including at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing). Sammy has worked with pioneers of digital performance: Troika Ranch and Wong Kar Wai’s cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and is active in projects engaging various underrepresented communities. Sammy has been featured in magazines, on television and commercials such as Discorder, Keedan, CBC Arts and BenQ. Sammy is currently leading a dance research project, We Were One, and media arts project Ritual-Spective 迴融, both funded by Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Sammy is the official instructor of Isadora, Member/Council of MotionDAO and Artistic Director of Chimerik似不像, an award winning interdisciplinary arts collective and design team.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Last Angel of History
Special 30th anniversary screening of The Last Angel of History, tracing the origins and significance of Afrofuturism, framed by the journey of a time-traveling data thief. With live performance from Speaker Music and conversation with The Otolith Group.
Fjord
A conservative family faces state scrutiny over their parenting in a progressive Norwegian town. Starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or–winning Fjord is a morally knotty drama about the limits of tolerance.
Trial of Hein
After 14 years on the mainland, Hein returns to the cloistered fishing village where he grew up. But when he arrives, he goes unrecognized. Amid mounting suspicion and hostility, the community holds a three-day trial to verify his identity.
Relax, Open Your Eyes
Confronted with her husband's declining health, Carrie Radomski dedicates herself to building Canada's first cryonics facility in this intimate documentary about hope, conviction, and humanity's enduring quest to overcome death.
Send the Rain
In Kaayla Whachell and Hayley Gray's tender drama Send the Rain, a young Okinawan-Canadian attempts to evacuate her stubborn grandmother from a wildfire zone, forcing both women to confront family history, responsibility, and the pull of home.
The History of Concrete
After attending a workshop on pitching saccharine Hallmark movies, John Wilson tries to apply all the same best practices to his documentary about concrete. Frequently absurd and endlessly entertaining detours, asides, and digressions ensue.