Cindy Mochizuki has created installation, performance, animation, drawings and collaborative works that consider spaces that embody both the fictional and documentary. Often working with archival sources, memory work and interviews; her practice revisits historical and personal memory. Her multi-media works experiment with moving images, optical illusions and magical realism through a hybrid of video, film, audio and animation.
A large body of her work investigates narratives and memories within the archive of familial architecture, including childhood spaces, home videos, photography, and oral histories. Family, displacement, migration and remembrance of traumatic historical memory have been departure points within an ongoing series of works that re-visits the memory and history of the Japanese Canadian internment and its effects on family members both within Canada and Japan.
Mochizuki’s short films have been screened in Hungary, Holland, Korea, Toronto, Los Angeles and Montreal. Recent exhibitions include: AIR 475, (2014) Yonago, Japan, Fictive Communities Asia, Koganecho Bazaar (2014), On the Subject of Ghosts, Hamilton Artists Inc (2013), Yokai & Other Spirits, Toronto Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (2013), and To|From BC Electric Railway 100 Years, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2012).
She has received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
Sue Sada Was Here is an experimental film that turns written texts Muriel Kitagawa (1912–1974) into scores of physical movement, which are then enacted in the historic Roedde House. Kitagawa’s editorial writing and unpublished manuscripts speak to the pre- and post-war periods in Vancouver, particularly the injustices of the Canadian government’s policies towards Japanese and Japanese Canadians. The performers embody Sue Sada, one of Kitagawa’s pen names and use books as objects of print history that can omit histories of violence and colonialism. This film was originally commissioned for Memories of the Future III.
Sue Sada Was Here will be showing as part of our TEAL program exhibiting July 15-19th, 2021!