Since director Zacharias Kunuk was awarded the Camera d’Or Award at Cannes in 2001, Igloolik Isuma Productions has been among the most well-known and influential indigenous film companies in the world. Isuma's premier movie, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) - the first-ever feature film produced by the Inuit and presented entirely in the Inuktitut language - has received numerous awards and critical acclaim.


"In Isuma Michael Evans explores multiple aspects of the production company's filmmaking, including its cultural and political stances, its embrace of folklore and respect for ancestors, and its role in the Arctic community of Igloolik. In-depth interviews with the people of Isuma and a thoughtful analysis of their films reveal how the producers combine their vision of Inuit wisdom and honour with the demands of modern filmmaking to create compelling and visually stunning films that share Inuit culture with an international audience.

Isuma: Inuit Video Art is a pragmatic, comprehensive and accessible study, bringing Isuma's Arctic to life while positioning its efforts within a larger frame of indigenous media and cultural expression."

Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness.

Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects.

Contributors include Raymond Bellour (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universität Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Université du Québec à Montréal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Université du Québec à Montréal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Université du Québec à Montréal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Hélène Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Université de Montréal)."