For All Things Spoken and Unwritten

For All Things Spoken and Unwritten borrows its title from the digital performance by Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad that opens this program. The compilation of moving images assembled under this title consider the power of voice and subjecthood while playing with the mischievous potential of storytelling, translation, and interpretation as either content or methodology.  

I love it when translation can be found to agree with our weird desires is a recorded digital performance and accompanying publication by Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad. In it, the artists volley common Palestinian Arabic and Turkish Arabic words, passing them back and forth searching for resonance and communion between their similar but distinct dialects. At times, the words are so similar only a honed ear can tell them apart. At others, meanings are linked together yet vary greatly. Still others are nothing alike. Through a series of stories, Alaa and Ulufer present the role cultural context has in defining meaning beyond the spoken word, illustrating how tricky language can be. 

Serene Husni’s short film Brown Bread and Apricots centres her Uncle Hammoudeh, who tells the story of his years as a troublemaker. Instead of punishing him, his family confers, and decides to trust Hammoudeh with managing their allowance. As he tells it, at 13-years-old and despite the absence of his elders, he relied on the comfort that “in a Palestinian house, the pantry is never bare.” He frugally satisfied the bare necessities of his siblings while consistently enjoying his favourite treat. In this film, the trials and treasures of living in the Palestinian diaspora are subtly unfurled through the sharing and retelling of core memories, first by Hammoudeh, and then by Serene. 

For All Things Spoken and Unwritten also includes the work of Nour Bishouty, the current Images x Ace Hotel Artist in Residence. Her video Heim Frost was recorded during the Twenty-three Days at Sea Residency with Access Gallery Vancouver. It assembles scenes of day-to-day life aboard a freighter and includes the passing and unembellished anecdotes of Johannes Elmar Streicher. As an artistic gesture, Nour herself chronicles the self-assigned chronicler of the ship, Second Commander Streicher. 

In the experimental video poem Canada Park, Razan AlSalah takes viewers through the undercommons– a potential place where demolished, historic Palestinian sites may still be thriving. An eerie funhouse-like score by London-based musician, producer, and DJ Nabiha Iqbal is the backdrop to Razan’s mythic story. Told from the perspective of an all-seeing eye and using Google Maps along with 20th-century colonial landscape photography, the filmmaker geographically and ideologically locates what she calls the site of a “self-fulfilled scriptural and algorithmic prophecy." In this work Razan creates a counter-mythology rooted in the 2007 March of Return to Latroun.

The artists and filmmakers presented in For All Things Spoken and Unwritten explore a potent understanding of mischief, youthful and resilient in spirit. This screening asks, might mischief be a tool to subvert—as opposed to support—dominant narratives? What social and ideological tensions can mischief reveal? Is it possible that the disruption caused by mischief could aid in liberatory thinking? How might it fall short? And what might generative mischief look like?

This screening is followed by a conversation between artist Nour Bishouty and filmmaker Serene Husni. The program is part of Ace Hotel Toronto's Shorts in Conversation Series.

Images Festival, as it has done in the previous years, continues to support the Palestinian right to expression and continues to platform Palestinian works to oppose Anti-Palestinian racism that "silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians."

Content Warning: Please note that Heim Frost contains classist, homophobic, racist, and sexist dialogue.