C.V. | megan-leighheilig

C.V.

Education:

Higher Institute of Fine Art (HISK), Gent, Belgium (2018 – 2020)

MFA with distinction from the University of Cape Town, Cape Town South Africa (2016 – 2017)

BFA from the university of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (2012 – 2015)

Curated Exhibitions and Video or Film Screenings:

21st Biennial Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil | Imagined Communities (2019-2020)

"Sir, 'Where is this place? : 8.7832° S, 34.5085° E", curated by Megan Mace, Beijing, China (2019)

Failure of Cohabitation curated by Daniela Géo, MHKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2019)

Contour Biennale, We Cannot Work Like This: Decolonial Practices and Degrowth curated by Natasa Petresin Bachelez (2019)

Remanences, 3rdEdition Yaphoto curated by Yves Chatap, Yaoundé, Cameroon (2019)

Tenderflix 2018, British Film Institute, London, England (2018)

Istanbul Experimental Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey (2018)

Painting the Spectrum: LGTTQ+ Film Festival, Georgetown, Guyana (2018)

Women Make Waves Film Festival, Taiwan, (2018)

Antwerp Queer Arts Festival: Experimental Film Screening, Antwerp, Belgium (2018)

Rites of Exchange: performance Lecture Series, ISELP, Brussels, Belgium (2018)

Pyrenees Spur, Aragonese Pyrenees, Spain (2018)

Out and Loud Queer Film Festival, Pune, India (2018)

I Want to Show You Something, Cape Town, South Africa (2018)

30th Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques

International Videoart Festival, Marseille France (2017)

MADATAC 2017, Madrid, Spain (2017)

17 Days Video Series (Vol. 10), New York and Michigan, United States of America (2017)

Krafta Doc Film Festival, Glasgow (2017)

Digital Africa, Open Source / YaPhoto

Yaphoto Video Art Screening, Tokyo, Japan (2017)

Digital Africa, Open Source / YaPhoto

Yaphoto Video Art Screening, London, England (2017)

Digital Africa, Open Source / YaPhoto

Yaphoto Video Art Screening, Yaoundé, Cameroon (2017)

International Video Art House Madrid, Madrid, Spain (2017)

Seven Hills: 2nd Kampala Biennale, Virtual Mobilities Selected Video Screening, Kampala, Uganda (2016)

Abuja International Film Festival, Abuja, Nigeria (2017)

Bad Video Art Festival, Moscow, Russia (2016)

Art for Living Space, CICA Museum (Czong Institute for Contemporary Art), Gimpo- Si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea (2017)

Workshops:

Inkhanyiso, Photo XP (Photo Experience) printmaking workshop run by Halfa Pictcha 2014, Johannesburg, South Africa

Site-specific Installations, Interventions, Collaborations and Artist Run Projects:

Modify (v), Johannesburg, South Africa (2015)
African Queens Project, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015)
The House Shop Window, Johannesburg, South Africa (2014 – 2015)
The Toy Shop Window, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015)
Department of Sex Education and Family Planning, Johannesburg, South Africa (2014)

The Toy Shop 1, Johannesburg, South Africa (2014)

Halfa Pictcha House, Johannesburg, South Africa (2014)

You Always see Half the Picture, Johannesburg, South Africa (2014)

Conferences:

SAVAH (South African Visual Art Historians) Conference (2017)

Endangered Bodies: Representing and Policing the Body in Western Culture International Conference/Exhibition, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal (2018)

Statement:

All the things I (like to think I) do:

Working with people, actors, students, children, family, friends, lovers

Developing and workshopping texts

Reading: James Baldwin, Maggie Nelson, Elena Ferrante, bell hooks, Jean Baudrillard books twist of fate, they create rip in time, a split

Writing scripts inspired by these texts; a synthesis of experience and stories collected from others and constructing images

Filming in real spaces or constructed ones

Constructing ones (installations)

cutting, pouring, breaking, pasting, sticking, licking, painting and taking.

I'm thinking about the power of a single text, the ability to name and ‘uname’ (the ‘new’ global economy?), the moment when anything is possible if you know what to look for and have the privilege to attain it. I’m inspired and disgusted by the internet, the iconography of a no particular place. But I use its visual and audio languages in order, I think, to reflect on the of indeterminacy and inaccuracy of historical narratives or even in everyday conversation. Combining and layering the present and the past I combine historical narratives what I consider a contemporary ‘archive’, in the form of social media, blogs, youtube videos; as a repository (however fictional) of collective memory. I also work with my family archives, especially the stories told by my grandfather, and use his recollections as a starting point to map out the complex stories of the people who traveled from Germany to Egypt and eventually ended up in Johannesburg during the early 1900. They tell the stories of gamblers, criminals, Nazi sympathizers, prisoners of war and love. The narrations bares the marks of memory loss and historical amnesia. They reveal the impossibility of a ‘truthful’ recollection. Finding or constructing locations: my filmic practice is rooted in installation, sculpture, photography, collage, site-specific interventions, performance and text. It always starts with a text, a quote, a cut-up or throw-away line.

In the chapter “About Portraying Expression: The Essay Film as Inter-view” (2011), from the book “The Essay Film from Montaigne, After Marker by Timothy Corrigan, he states that one of the most defining characteristics of the essay film is the use of a personal, subjective voice. The fact that the narration and narrator is in a constant process of “self-questioning” gives the form a distinct complexity, he argues. This mode of storytelling is closely linked to pre-filmic, literary practices such as the biography and autobiography. According to Corrigan, the most poignant film essays find their form in the portrait or self-portrait form which began to gain visibility in the postwar essays during and after the 1940’s. Its an interesting question to think about the importance of personal experience in a time that was so dominated by the notion and image of national identity.

Through the subjective and personal experiences of my individual voice and that of the storyteller, the film essay shows a history aware of its own historical inaccuracy. History is written by the victors, and so perhaps it can never truly be an accurate representation. This is the position of the essay film as I see it; between subjectivity and ‘objectivity’ lies something in-between. It is through this in-between space of uncertainty and indeterminacy, that the film essay as an art medium presents the possibility to imagine/re-imagine.

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MH