The Power Plant and The Vega Foundation present Owner of a Lonely Heart, a program of recent moving image works by contemporary artists Haig Aivazian, Stephanie Comilang, Alia Farid, Hope Pearl Strickland and Yuyan Wang. On view in The Power Plant’s North Gallery, the 80-minute program cycles on a loop, moving from documentary, narrative, and archival approaches to filmmaking toward increasingly associative, musical, and rhythmic forms.
The artists’ works trace the movement of raw materials drawn from the earth, transformed into products, and transported by waterways–be they petroleum, pearls, or plastic plants. Each work portrays a dense web of relations linking labour, ecosystems and global economies. By tracing the transformation of raw matter, the works reveal how people are bound by circumscribed geographies and unevenly shaped by global networks of extraction and circulation. Together, the artists consider how geopolitical histories shape social and collective identity, and how individuals locate themselves within an overwhelming present. When the prosperity and stability experienced in one place is enabled by the exploitation and scarcity imposed elsewhere, what responsibility does vision bring?
Press release from The Power Plant
Image: Yuyan Wang. Still from Green Grey Black Brown. 2024. Image courtesy the artist
