Part 1: Uganda
Feb 6-March 6, 2013
an apexart Franchise Exhibition

Part 2: Exhibitions TBA
Organized by REV-
(Originally presented by apexart)

Synopsis

Video Halls (or "bibanda") are often no more than small huts where viewers pay a few cents to watch pirated DVDs on diesel-powered television screens.  In the majority of villages and towns, they are the only form of popular visual entertainment, reaching millions of Ugandans every month. “VJs” are local performer/pirates who translate Hollywood action movies, Nollywood dramas, Bollywood musicals, and pornography into the primary local language of Luganda, acting as both translator and commentator, making jokes, providing context, and operating as nodes of distribution to the bibanda.

Video Slink Uganda is a multi-part project of curated short-form experimental videos by contemporary African and African-American artists that will be translated by VJs and some burned onto pirated DVDs that play before the main feature film.

Each of these videos appropriate and subvert mainstream cinematic tropes, using repetition, simultaneity, and the compression of time and space as a way to question customary modes of perception. By both transposing these works into a different cinematic culture and asking the VJ’s to translate these works into Luganda, Video Slink Uganda pronounces the asymmetry between not only image, sound, and language but between cultures.