Picturing the Political
Picturing the Political: Richard Fung in Conversation with Pratibha Parmar
Tues., Jan. 24, 2017, 7 pm
Timken Auditorium, CCA SF
Richard Fung is Trinidad-born artist, writer, activist, and educator, based in Toronto. His award-winning experimental, autobiographical and narrative videos have addressed the subjects of gay pornography, the colonial body in the Caribbean and Asia, AIDS, and immigration.
Pratibha Parmar is an international filmmaker, based in the SF Bay Area. She is known for bringing complex subjects into mainstream media and helping to shape the popular discourse on race, representation, sexuality, and creativity. She is an Associate Professor of film @ CCA.
Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts
Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts brings together locally and nationally renowned artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars for a series of conversations to discuss a broad range of LGBTQI topics in the humanities, architecture, design, and the arts. QCCA is an on-going collaboration between the Queer Cultural Center, California College of the Arts, and U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
Extended Biographies
Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. He holds a diploma from the Ontario College of Art, a degree in cinema studies and an MEd in sociology and cultural studies, both from the University of Toronto. He is Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, teaching courses in Integrated Media and Art and Social Change.
His work comprises challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel/Palestine, and his own family history. His single-channel and installation works, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion (2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) and Re:Orientations (2016), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States and Trinidad and Tobago.
Richard’s essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002), later updated and translated into French. He was a Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Video Art and the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art. In 2015, he received the Kessler Award from CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York for “a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies.
Pratibha Parmar is a British filmmaker, who has worked as a director, producer and writer. She is known internationally for her political and often controversial documentary film work as well as her activism within the global feminism and lesbian rights movements. She has collaborated with many well-known artists and activists, and public figures across the world. Parmar specifically uses the camera to benefit women worldwide. Focusing her lens on disenfranchised communities and peoples internationally, her contribution to worldwide humanitarian rights and education has been crucial. Her films are marked by political complexity and visual richness, taking up the themes of women’s strength, racial and cultural oppression and the lives of South Asian LBGT people. She is well known for drawing on humour, wit, women’s everyday lives and visionary storytelling to articulate the realities and dreams of feminist, lgbt women and South Asian diasporic life.
