Romeo Gongora
Canada Council Residency
2016
Raphael Bendahan is a Montreal-based film/video artist and photographer whose work deconstructs narrative forms and documentary elements to create multi-layered explorations of memory, identity, erasure, desire and displacement. His films and videos use a cacophony of languages, text and silence help to define a space between the margins and the frame and the periphery of new narratives, using visual strategies. As Raphael’s roots extend to Spain, to a history of expulsion, his work naturally invests the present with the traces of an exilic memory. Instinctively, it describes a double vision of parallel lives, of stories that recapture the splintered histories of other communities with a diasporic culture. His work sides with those whose lives and voices have been silenced.
Raphael’s films and videos have been shown internationally in film festivals, galleries and museums alike, including; the Centre Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, The Pacific and Quebec Cinematheques, The Montreal Jewish Film Festival, The New York City Experimental Film Festival, Belgium’s 5th Experimental Film Festival of Knokke Heist and the Millenium Film Archives of New York City. His photography, film and video work has been collected by the National Archives of Canada, the University of New Mexico, the Knokke Heist Film Archives in Belgium, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council Art Bank in Ottawa.
Canada Council Residency
The Canada Council for the Arts partnered with Acme between 20012 – 2016 to provide residencies that were located at Bow Quarter in E3. Application and selection was undertaken directly by the Canada Council for the Arts.
