London-based electro-pop band Petit Mal, comprised of Melanie Gilligan and Ben Seymour, combines time-travelling synth pop, leftfield intelligence, and ice cold passion with complex emotions, beautifully austere vocals, and compelling electromechanical melodies. The duo has been described as practicing a kind of electro-pop fusion with influences from Chris & Cosey to Alain Robbe-Grillet. Gilligan’s icily melancholic vocals and Seymour’s synths and piano stake out an unironic reinvention of post-punk and electro sounds.

Katherine Ylitalo will present a day of events in The Butterfly Garden, a public art work created by Canadian artist Mike MacDonald. Ylitalo will discuss ancient and modern gardens of the world through examples presented in paintings, sculpture, frescoes, textiles, ceramics, and architecture, to offer insight into the pleasures, ideals, social history, and practicalities of gardens. This will be followed by a tour of the Butterfly Garden. Guests will then be invited to spend the rest of their afternoon drawing in the garden with instruction from Ylitalo. Check Banff Heritage Tourism for a complete listing of the day’s events.

Suzanne Cotter discusses the conceptual and aesthetic framework behind the upcoming 10th Sharjah Biennial, which opens in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates on March 15, 2011. The Biennial is co-curated by Cotter and independent curator Rasha Salti. Cotter was also recently appointed as curator of exhibitions, Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi Project, prior to which, she was senior curator and deputy director of Modern Art Oxford from 2002 to 2009.

London-based artist and writer Melanie Gilligan will discuss her recent film and video work which uses surreal, satirical and disturbing narrative to comment on the state of politics and the public realm. Her fictional films and performance work have been presented world-wide at such institutions as Tate Britain, London; Sculpture Center, New York; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Chisenhale Gallery, London; and Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne.

Mark Clintberg will introduce the major themes of his new public artwork Meet me in the woods, and will contextualize this work within his larger practice as an artist.

Commissioned for the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Banff Centre.

Join Stefan Kalmár, executive director and curator of Artists Space, New York, in conversation with Kitty Scott, director of Visual Arts at The Banff Centre, as they discuss his approach to directing Artists Space. Kalmár was previously the director of Kunstverein München, director of the Institute of Visual Culture, Cambridge, and curator of Cubitt Gallery, London. He was co-editor of Be Nice, Share Everything, Have Fun (2009) which is a survey of four previous years of exhibitions at the Kunstverein München.

Ron Terada is a Vancouver-based artist who reconsiders the legacies of conceptual art and its reception. His work appropriates vernacular texts, typically drawn from street signage, popular music, and advertising. Through their deadpan reproduction, he invokes conceptual art’s trademark adoption of language in ways that are comic, melancholic, and self-effacing, apparently refusing authorial presence or control.

Winner of three awards at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Xavier Dolan delivers his directorial debut, J’ai tué ma mere. Dolan casts himself as Hubert Minel, in this coming of age, semi-autobiographical tale of a brash 17-year-old that dislikes his mother intensely. Confused and torn by a love-hate relationship that obsesses him more and more each day, Hubert wanders in and out of an adolescence that is both marginal and typical.

A Special Presentation at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, Broken Embraces is a moving and terrible story from writer/director Pedro Almodóvar. The story of Mateo, Lena, Judit, and Ernesto is one of amour fou, dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery, and a guilt complex. Almodóvar skilfully and effortlessly uncovers the secrets of everyone’s various pasts in this steamy, scheming, and romantic melodrama.

Director of Witte de With, The Netherlands, Nicolaus Schafhausen will discuss the thematic project Morality. In the most general sense, morality is a category of aide-mémoires for living a righteous life; in its most inflexible sense, it engages the world through categorical imperatives, produces intolerance towards skepticism, and insists on transcendental ideas even when these have become unnecessary. The aim of the Morality project is to present a wide range of attitudes which tend to problematize a total conception of morality.

Presented in collaboration with Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver; the University of British Columbia’s Critical and Curatorial Studies Program; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; and Visual Arts at the Banff Centre as part of Walter Phillips Gallery Curatorial Speaker Series.

Chris Eamon is a New York-based independent curator and writer. Previously, he was curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include A Rictus Grin (2008), Broadway 1602, New York; and Accidental Modernism (2008), Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. Eamon’s most recent publication project, Art of Projection (2009), Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, investigates the historical and contemporary use of projected images in art from the screen to the exhibition space and back again.

A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity. It’s 1967, and Larry Gopnik wants to be taken seriously, but he’s assailed on all sides by disrespect. Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism — and intersections thereof — A Serious Man is a philosophical cry to the heavens, told in sophisticated shtick by renowned directors Joel and Ethan Coen.

Ragnar Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson play country music at the opening reception of Ragnar Kjartansson: The End.

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s practice is characterized by experiments in visual art, music, and theatre. Working primarily as a performance artist, his pieces play on contradictory feelings of sorrow and happiness, horror and beauty, drama and humour.

Winner of the audience award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, An Education is a coming-of-age drama based on an autobiographical memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber. Set in the early 1960s, the film features Jenny, a young woman full of promise and intent to study at Oxford. But after meeting an older man Jenny begins to believe that she can learn things outside the classroom, casting doubt on her future plans.