San Francisco International Arts Festival Presents LINKING ARMS By Art Paul Cartier

San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF) is proud to present the premiere of Linking Arms by photographer/videographer Artpaul Cartier. The silent montage is a central project related to the Festival's 2018 theme, Down by the Riverside that honors the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Linking Arms takes the form of 20' x 30' video 15 minutes in duration projected onto the perimeter wall of Lower Fort Mason. The film starts at dusk and repeats on a loop into the evening as Festival goers move from one Fort Mason venue to another seeing performances.

Linking Arms is comprised of period newsreels and other film footage of occurrences and happenings during and around the Civil Rights struggle of 1968. It is an abstract piece based on historical events; a moving billboard designed to arrest the passerby with images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and local struggles of the Bay Area in 1968 to the present. Images include the Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers the San Francisco State University student strike for Black Studies curricula, struggles for equity in housing and pay, and on to the recent Women's Marches, and March for Our Lives in January 2018.

Cartier, who spent many of his formative years in the American south, said of the work, "Linking Arms is an artistic attempt to show the positive effects of mass actions against injustices and oppression in our political landscape. But I did not set out to make a documentary; it is more of a personal statement."

Artpaul Cartier

Artpaul cartier has been photographing in San Francisco and elsewhere for over 35 years and is a founding member of the traveling Taoist photographers and of NOPA ARTS.

He has been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco International Art Festival in recent years. His videos have been designed for each year's theme, each with a unique approach to their subject.

In 2015, the project Profiling (as part of Bearing Witness: Surveillance in the Drone Age) introduced the idea of interactivity with the spectator, where each declared a "crime" and had their mugshots taken to create their profile. These were then converted into "Suspected" posters that the participants could later access.

In 2016, cartier created a video series titled in the air for the Dada centennial. Each was a video version of the famous Exquisite Corpse concept, including crowd-sourced submissions from friends and the internet, accessed on a randomly-selected day.