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Ryan Ferko

Ryan Ferko

History

Ryan Ferko (Canada) is an artist working predominantly in film and video. Between cinemas and galleries, his work is concerned with landscapes as unstable sources of narration, turning to myth, story-telling, amateur experts, and distorted memories as a way to find narratives alternative to official histories. Based in Toronto, recent work has been shown at Viennale, TIFF, NYFF, Black Canvas Festival de Cine Contemporaneo, amongst others. Since 2013 he has been working in collaboration with Parastoo Anoushahpour and Faraz Anoushahpour. Their shared practice explores the tension of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to both decode their surroundings and trouble the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery. Their recent work has shown at Punto de Vista Film Festival, Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Art (Spain), Sharjah Film Platform, Viennale, NYFF, TIFF, IFF Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Experimenta (Bangalore), and Media City Film Festival (2015-2018).

Profile

Ryan Ferko

Movies

Director

A young Slovakian immigrant opens a uranium mine near Elliot Lake in northern Ontario, and later builds a massive replica of the modest church from his childhood village. Stranded amongst suburban streets named after prize-winning Holstein cows, this monumental cathedral now sits, unfinished and private. Teenage zombies emerge from lakes and rivers around Serpent River First Nation, once poisoned with uranium waste. There is talk of eugenics at a Holstein pageant, and a retired dairy farmer and his wife remember a recurring dream where their work is never done.

Hrvoji, Look at You from the Tower

Hrvoji, Look at You from the Tower

Director

An unconventional, tone-shifting travelogue that stitches together nations of the former Yugoslavia through chance encounters, 1970s rock music, architecture, and inventive editing, Ryan Ferko’s Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower locates traces of the past in an increasingly fractured present.

If All That Changes Quickly

If All That Changes Quickly

Director

In an age of collective anxiety around issues of safety – be it global, national, or personal –we are interested in the ways in which different practices of resilience change environments, create subjects, unlink temporalities, and redefine relations of security and insecurity. As populist political rhetoric across Europe and North America expresses this in increasingly reactionary ways, often articulated in relation to threats created by other people, what is the relationship to earlier, more fundamental issues of safety that are managed more quietly and bureaucratically?

Director

beach is a recreation of a live performance originally presented at Mercer Union in Toronto in June 2018. An expanded prologue for the film Chooka, the performance used a live feed from an iPhone to project images taken while making the film, as well as material from Jacques Madvo’s archive, the original spark for the creation of the work. Paired with writing that was swapped back and forth between the artists, the work meditates on the politics of an archive, the shifting agency of different bodies in a landscape, and the challenge of asking what a complete image could be.

Director

In 1973, the Shah of Iran commissioned the construction of a paper factory in the lush northern province of Gilan. The arrival of heavy industry in a predominately agricultural region brought with it a series of interventions into this landscape, including the construction of modernist apartment blocks and purpose-built villas to house foreign engineers from Canada and the United States and their families. Their stay, however, came to a sudden halt in 1979 with the Iranian revolution forcing them to flee the site overnight. Chooka unfolds around the site of this factory, returning to the location 40 years after it mysteriously appeared in Jacques Madvo’s 1978 footage. Treating his archival material as a guide, the film moves through a landscape altered by industry, technology and revolution, bringing silent images from the past forward to a location caught within a perpetually uncertain present.

Heart of a Mountain

Heart of a Mountain

Director

The chasm between languages is explored through a photograph of a volcanic stone slice in Taiwan. As technology attempts to foster translation and understanding, it also produces new meanings.

Strange Vision of Seeing Things

Strange Vision of Seeing Things

Director

Despite the title’s twin references to eyesight, Ryan Ferko’s Strange Vision of Seeing Things is a film about unseen buildings and conflicts in Belgrade: those deliberately obscured, those unseeable to a tourist’s eyes, and those masked by monuments, their hypervisibility itself a form of obfuscation.

Director

A faltering narrator attempts to recount a family holiday as memory — sparked by a found postcard, a family photo album, and footage from two distinct locations and spatio-temporalities (Toronto and Berlin) — summons forth a barrage of flickering images, creating psychic hiccups and firecrackers of recall.

Director

In July 2017 residents of the Markham suburban development of Cathedraltown awoke to find a chrome replica of a prize-winning Holstein cow, double its original size, suspended on 25-foot tall stilts in the centre of a small crescent facing their homes. The sculpture was commissioned by Cathedraltown’s developer, and donated to the City of Markham as a public art piece. The residents, however, quickly rose in opposition to a sculpture that they felt did not represent them, and negatively affected their quiet suburban community. Charity is presented as a public digital artwork produced by the National Film Board of Canada in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. The interactive documentary employs 360° video and photogrammetry to share a variation on the familiar interactive real estate tour –– where a house in Cathedraltown becomes a site to collect and re-narrate a community’s confrontation with a piece of public art, in turn offering a portrait of private property.