You are invited to the premiere screening of a short film made
by running the Royal Ontario Museum with The Movement Movement
and 300 members of the public on Monday April 21 at 8PM
at The Gladstone Hotel RSVP

PREMIERE SCREENING
MERCURY FILMS PRESENTS
THE MOVEMENT MOVEMENT
RUN THE ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM
DIRECTOR NICK DE PENCIER RUNNING TIME 7MIN 25SEC
FUNDED BY CTV'S BRAVO!FACT(FOUNDATION TO ASSIST CANADIAN TALENT)
MONDAY APRIL 21 AT 8PM
SCREENING AT 8:30PM
THE GLADSTONE HOTEL
NORTH BALLROOM
1214 QUEEN STREET WEST
FILMMAKER AND ARTISTS WILL BE PRESENT
Q+A HOSTED BY MISHA GLOUBERMAN
RUNNING THEME DANCE PARTY TO FOLLOW

A choreographed crowd formed by hundreds of runners activates the museum’s galleries alongside its six million artifacts. This moving sculpture is made up of: an art class from a high school outside of the city’s centre, a group of athletes from the running community, artists and art administrators, museum patrons,
and members of the public who showed up with running shoes on. Temporarily, people and place come together in unexpected ways to run an institution.

“Run the ROM” is a taboo-smashing artifact that places the audience in the stampede of runners to experience the thrill and exhilaration of running a cultural institution. The runners stream by a cavalcade
of suits of medieval  armour, Egyptian mummies and Etruscan pottery on plinths, the vitality of their speed and life-force infusing these otherwise staid museum objects. Augmented by an aural universe of the echo-ing insistence of pounding feet on gallery floors and the laboured breathing of the human machine at work, the film charts the progress of the runners to underscore the breadth and extent of their accomplishment,
an artifact that captures the vanguard of event based art.

"Run the ROM" is produced by Mercury Films and funded by CTV's Bravo!FACT (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent)

THE MOVEMENT MOVEMENT
The Movement Movement mobilizes hundreds of participants to run art institutions around the world (Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art; Royal Ontario Museum; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art). The Movement Movement performs a usual activity, running, in an unlikely place: a museum. The result
is temporary, participatory public art that runs alongside a museum’s permanent collection.

The performance is an orchestrated situation or set of conditions for impromptu community to form
within a public institution. One condition involves mobilizing hundreds of individuals and social groups
to congregate in a museum and participate in a choreographed sculpture. Running indoors is a second condition. It requires participants to break one of the fundamental rules of how we behave in the public sphere. Remember that first regulation of elementary school? “NO RUNNING in the hallway!” This playful transgression performed together breaks down social barriers allowing new relationships to form. People and place come together in an unexpected way to run an institution. The third condition is the symbolic bestowal of the museum to The Movement Movement, from the initial moment of gaining permission
to run the museum to working with the museum and its staff and departments. By being granted agency
the audience radically redefines its relationship with the institution and exercises a new one by literally
running the museum. Here, social change is not only imagined but put into practice: if we can run
a museum together what else can we run as a social body?

The Movement Movement is artist/curator Jessica Rose and dancer/choreographer Jenn Goodwin
and is based in Toronto, Canada.

MERCURY FILMS
Mercury Films Inc. is the Toronto based documentary production company of Nick de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal, and has produced award winning films such as: Manufactured Landscapes, Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, and The True Meaning of Pictures.

The Gladstone Hotel is a unique urban hotel providing both travelers and Torontonians with a truly authentic experience of the local creative culture. Visitors can experience the comforts of the hotel's thirty-seven artist-designed guest rooms, attend art related, social, or corporate events held in our versatile venues, eat and drink in our Ballroom Café and Melody Bar and then step out into the heart of the city's vibrant art and design neighbourhood.

WWW.THEMOVEMENTMOVEMENT.CA + WWW.MERCURYFILMS.CA