The Table, Farheen Haq, 5 min (based in Victoria, BC)

• Farheen is a South Asian Canadian artist who lives and works on the Coast Salish territories of the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations in Victoria, British Columbia. She was born and raised in the Niagara region of Ontario. Farheen’s media based practice explores cultural inscriptions of the body, ritual and gesture.

The Table is a video diptych of gestures that emerge from my subconscious where I tap into a lineage of women who have come before: those who washed by hand, made rotis, ground up spices, swaddled, wrapped and comforted. By wrapping myself in the long tablecloth, I am the baby, the young child and also the grandmother wrapped in a white sari.

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Maternity Test, Irene Lusztig, 14 min (based in Santa Cruz, CA)

• Irene is a filmmaker, teacher, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. For the past decade, her work has been centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies.

Eleven women are invited to read a text composited from anonymous mothering.com forum posts. In turns, they narrate an intimate experience of traumatic c-section birth. The collective reading raises shifting questions about idealized birth, maternal language, reality, performance, public feminism, and private confession. Maternity Test is a screen test, an audition, and an exercise in empathy and embodiment.

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Mama Virtual: Ana & Aleyda, Jeny Amaya, 12 min (based in Los Angeles)

• Jeny’s work explores autobiographical narratives, notions of family, and how the temporality of the past materializes itself in the present of the Salvadoran diaspora in California.

A selection from a longer, episodic series of portraits of immigrant mothers, Mama Virtual: Ana & Aleyda materializes the virtual sphere that transnational mothers construct in order to maintain contact with their children and families back in their home countries. Separated from their children, Ana and Aleyda externalize this virtual realm through their performance of the “mother’s touch” through the touchscreen of a phone, digital images, phone cards, and other mediated technologies.

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Our Summer Made Her Light Escape, Sasha Waters Freyer, 4.5 min (based in Richmond, Virginia)

• Sasha is a moving image artist who makes unsentimental films about the loss of innocence, real or imagined. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and digital media.

Our Summer Made Her Light Escape is a wordless portrait of interiority, maternal ambivalence and the passage of time.

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Mothertime, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, 60 min (based in Los Angeles)

• Kristy is a Los Angeles based artist who teaches documentary at the University of California Los Angeles. Her work in film explores gender representation and the lives of women in large and small scales, as well as modern California culture.

Embracing the action-oriented technology of the Go-Pro camera, Mothertime is an essayistic portrait sweeping us into a corporeal experience in parenting. By using a very small, portable camera worn by mother and child, or left on any surface and turned on and off remotely, this video is a real-time, sensorial journey that plays in the physical and emotional space between mother and child.