This is a Crisis
Tamara JonesFeaturing spliced audio of Mayor John Tory’s 2014, 2018, and 2022 victory speeches, an anonymous bureaucrat turns hostile architecture into a personal playground. This is a Crisis is an experimental work of video art offering critical commentary on procedural obstacles, surveillance, and criminalization of poverty as well as what cities lose when they leave the most marginalized behind.
كیف لا نغرق في السراب, To Remain in the No Longer
Joyce JoumaaTo Remain in the No Longer examines the architectural, social, and political significance of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s abandoned fairground in Tripoli, Lebanon. Drawing together archival materials, interviews with local people, 16mm and digital images of the buildings as they stand today, the film reflects on both the fraught history of this site and its connection to Lebanon’s ongoing financial crisis.
a city in pursuit
How might a city fail? Who determines which factors contribute to its success? Its livability? Which principles determine what is monitored and measured? Whose wants, needs, sorrows, dreams, and desires are considered? What is a city in pursuit of? And who decides?
Artist Tamara Jones’ moving image practice engages research and site-specific performance. In This is a Crisis, an anonymous bureaucrat traipses across the City of Toronto, activating public sites with their body. John Tory’s bombastic victory speeches throughout his nine years as Toronto’s mayor are broadcast over the gentle movements. As he makes unkept, cross-partisan promises of progress, safety, and livability, the bureaucrat dances, repurposing the hostile city as their personal playground.
In 1962, Oscar Niemeyer, a leader in the development of Modernist architecture, was invited to conceive an international fairground in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon. Though construction began, the project was abandoned during the country’s civil war and the fairgrounds were never completed. Joyce Joumaa’s film To Remain in the No Longer considers how architecture operates in its failed state, and reflects on Lebanon's current socio-economic crisis by examining the monument to modernism as it exists in current-day Tripoli.
As Tamara and Joyce individually tease out the fallacy of progress, the works in this program refuse to separate the city, its infrastructure, and architecture from those who inhabit it.
Please join us for a conversation following the screening with artists Tamara Jones, Joyce Joumaa, and Director of Photography, William Albu.
2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
Sidewalk-level entrance, elevator and ramp available, door width 32 inches, no automatic doors. No accessible parking on-site. Four wheelchair accessible seats in the cinema. 15 step-free seats in row 9. Accessible gender-neutral washroom located on the 2nd and 3rd floor.
For a map to Innis Town Hall, click here
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