The Alianait! arts festival in Nunavut is being streamed live on the internet on Isuma.TV every night this week beginning at 7 pm. From the festival website:

The Alianait Arts Festival is an annual event in its fourth year. No less than ten days (and nights) of art, music, film, storytelling, circus arts, dance and theatre. Alianait is an Inuit expression of joy and celebration and to celebrate our fourth annual festival, the theme for Alianait 2008 is String Games - an ancient Inuit tradition.

The festival started on June 21 and runs until July 1. Here's the webcast schedule for Isuma.TV:

June 21: 7 to 10 pm EST –
ALIANAIT GRAND OPENING - LIVE at www.isuma.tv from the Big Top

June 22 : 7 to 9 pm EST –
FIBONACCI CIRCUS PERFORMANCE - LIVE from the Big Top

June 23: 7 to 9 pm EST –
NUNAVUT ARTS FESTIVAL WITH LIVE MUSIC - LIVE from the Old Residence

June 24: 7 to 9 pm EST –
ARTICIRQ/OATIARIO - LIVE from the Big Top

June 25: 7 to 10 pm –
STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE - LIVE from Parish Hall

June 26: 7 to 10 pm EST-
SAQIYUQ THEATRE PERFORMANCE – LIVE from the Parish Hall

June 27: 7 to 9 pm EST –
ART EXHIBIT – LIVE from the Nunatta Museum

June 28: 7 to 9 pm EST –
YOUTH MUSIC CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

June 29: 2 to 5 pm EST –
FREE MUSIC CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

June 30: 7 to 10 pm EST –
STRING GAMES FINALE CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

July 1: 2 to 5 pm EST –
FREE MUSIC CONCERT - LIVE from the Big Top

Make sure you catch Paige Gratland's "Celebrity Lezbian Fist Launch" this Saturday June 21st from 1-3pm at Art Metropole, 788 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Mél Hogan for AT with Paige Gratland

[AT] Can you talk a bit about the story of Cynthia Plaster Caster, the inspiration for your project?

[PG] I saw a documentary made about her practice of casting rock and roller cock. When she started she was a art school student and rock and roll groupie who united those two interests in a project which gave her access to the people she admired. I identified with this aspect as my own projects and collaborations, free dance lessons, tit pin, burdensum, came out of an interest in connecting with a direct public. I was turned on by the strategy.

It’s not often that you visit a major civic gallery and come away amazed, disturbed and politically provoked. Rebecca Belmore’s current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery does exactly that and more. It is a remarkable retrospective for an artist deeply engaged in some of the most defining and difficult politics of our time.

Belmore’s practice encompasses sculpture/installation, performance, video and photography. The exhibition includes video documentation of five of Bellmore’s performances, and the much talked about video installation Fountain (2005), which is projected on a wall of falling water in a darkened room. The exhibition also includes some of her sculpture work and components from her performances. There is so much to see in this collection and all of it so very good.

Belmore’s art is an embodied practice, and as an aboriginal woman, her body is a complicated site where colonial, cultural and resistant tensions are inscribed on a daily basis. Wild (2001-2008) is a four-post bed with a red satin bedcover woven from beaver pelts and (black) human hair. The bed was created for an exhibition in The Grange, a colonial building that served as the original location of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Belmore sleeps in the bed unannounced. Nearby, hangs the disturbing Fringe (2008), a near life-size backlit photograph of a woman, naked but for a white sheet over her hips, lying on her side facing away from the viewer. On her back is a huge transversal wound starting at her right shoulder and ending below her left hip. The wound is sewn together, and hanging from the stitches are the beginnings of beadwork, small red beads decorating threads hanging from the grotesquely damaged skin.

(more on the exhibition...)

Katariina Lillqvist's political puppet film recently caused a bit of a ruckus - including hate mail and increased security - in Helsinki before it launched at the Tampere Film Festival, according to the Helsingin Sanomat:

The fantastical puppet animation Uralin perhonen (“Butterfly from the Urals”, “Far from the Urals”) tells in tragi-comic fashion the story of the alleged homosexual relationship between Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim and his Kirghiz valet, but it also delves into the life of members of the Red faction in Tampere during Finland’s bloody Civil War in 1918.

Lillqvist wants her film to provoke discussion on the Mannerheim myth, but admits she has been surprised and shocked at the furore that the film has generated in the evening papers even before it had its first screening.
The 26-minute puppet animation takes part next week in the Tampere Film Festival.

At the advance screening in Tampere on February 29th, there were considerable security measures in place, owing to the threats and hate mail that Lillqvist had received.

Check out the full story here.

Studio XX is accepting submissions for its residency and co-production programs. Project selection is made and announced at the end of April each year. Residencies are open to Quebecois and Canadian women. They are intended to offer an environment where artists can conceptualize and develop contemporary networked practices.

Residencies are eight weeks in length and include a $750 artist's fee, 45 hours of technical support ($1125 value), access to the Studio's equipment ($3335 rental value), the possibility to participate in certain group workshops ($200-300 value), and distinct working space for the artist and her instructor.

For more information about Residencies and co-production visit the Studio XX website.

Animal righters PETA staged a public political performance protesting the slaughter of pigs (yes the alliteration continues) for Mothers Day in Covent Gardens, London today.

I was going to pilfer the image of the performance from enemy-cum-friend-to-the-stars celebrity gossiper Perez Hilton, but his version contains his signature chicken scratch commentary over the photo, with a nipple whited out and the word MOO! scrawled near the performers mouth. Unsurprisingly the lean and fit Hilton doesn't like the sight of a little fat on the body - as this does not fit with the slim and vapid imagery of stardom. I guess political performance just can't quite gel with fabuland...

For more photos, visit PR Photos.

This December, I attended Jackie Gallant’s performance and discussion at GIV (Groupe intervention vidéo, in Montréal, Canada). Gallant’s “drumming” is nothing short of hypnotic, soothing and brilliant. I had the opportunity to interview her in light of her innovative sound work, curious about her inspirations, motivations, and how it all came together technologically. Gallant’s set-up was, her, surrounded by various drumming pads and mixers, pedals and wires—but the sounds were unmistakably affective.

Art Threat: Hi Jackie! So, how would you describe what you do? How would you describe your sound?

Jackie Gallant: With this project I am triggering samples using an electronic drum pad to create sound pieces. Basically I find samples, manipulate them using keyboards and computer software and then map the sounds into drum pads so that they can be ‘played’ much like a traditional drum kit. I then improvise using the processed samples. The source material comes from a variety of places, digging into old records or sounds that I’ve created, but there always seems to be an inherent rhythm in most of the samples and I guess there is always a hint of the rock or punk background that I have. I find that no matter what source material I use there always seems to be a driving, hypnotic rhythm that becomes more layered and more intense and then breaks down and builds back up again. I like slowly layering rhythmic samples until there is almost a solid block of sound with interweaving rhythms and textures.

The Canadian government is getting set to pass the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) into law. But most Canadians have never heard of the DCMA, let alone considered its implications for artists, educators and personal freedoms. Let's face it, copyright law is a confusing nest of fine print about rights and restrictions that give most non-lawyers a giant headache.

The puppet masters at dotboom have produced a somewhat hilarious Rant Puppet video to help Canadians make some sense of the copyright confusion. In a charming froggish way, the video introduces some of the critical issues being addressed in the DCMA.

For more information about getting involved in the campaign to stop the DCMA, check out the Campaign for Democratic Media and Michael Geist's website.

Did you awake to find an anarchist hiding under your Christmas tree this morning? If so you might not be alone, as artist Packard Jennings shopdropped a batch of Anarchist action figures at Target and Wal-Mart stores across San Francisco, waiting for unsuspecting consumers to pick them up this holiday season.

“When better than Christmas to make a point about hyper-consumerism?” Jennings asked the New York Times in a recent interview. A stereotype to the max, his plastic black block buddy sports a gas mask, bolt cutters, a gerry can of petrol and two Molotov cocktails. And did I mention he looks very, very angry?

You can watch the confusion as cashiers attempt to ring in the toy, as Jennings sticks around and videotapes the interaction. Actual quote from store manager: "It actually looks like something that some anti G6 [sic] summit activist would just put on our shelf."

Check out more photos and video at Packard Jennings' website.