A Smile Split by the Stars
May 24, 2025
For a map of Gallery 44, click here
Images Festival is committed to providing an accessible festival and continues to work to reduce barriers to participation at our events. This year, we are implementing a COVID-19 policy to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission for all, and to prioritize the participation of people who are disability-identified, immunocompromised, or part of an otherwise vulnerable group.
The following guidelines will be in place: Self-Assessment: We ask that staff and participants screen themselves for COVID-19 before visiting the exhibition.
A Smile Split by the Stars is a collaborative narration of m. nourbeSe philip’s poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Working within, across, and beyond colonial lexicons, the installation reads philip’s poem through, and as, different audio-visual-textual moments of revolutionary intent, wherein Black girlhood and Black femininity are, a priori, re-coding the aesthetic promises of modernity.
Please join us at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 12, 2025 for a poetry performance. This performance serves as a continuation of the conversation that the work in the gallery invokes, inviting philip to read her poems to us, reverberating through a show dedicated to her writing. We will thus expand and deepen our relationship to the text and the performer.
m. nourbeSe philip
m. nourbeSe philip was born in Trinidad and Tobago and educated at the University of West Indies, Mona, receiving a B.Sc. in Economics. She took graduate degrees in Political Science and Law at the University of Western Ontario and practiced law in Toronto for seven years before turning to a career in the arts, primarily as a poet, novelist, and essayist. Spanning the fields of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, English Literature, decolonial thought, and studies of poetic form and language, her work as an intellectual and poet considers how the displacement of Black people, within and in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery, has provided the conditions to express alternative forms of being that breach longstanding practices of dehumanization and racism. Philip has written 15 acclaimed books in different genres (essays, poetry, novels, plays) and her writings have been commissioned for 22 literary anthologies. While all her writings are commendable, her long cycle poem, Zong! is her most lauded. In 2014, Jenny Sharpe described the poem as “a new and different kind of speech/language for speaking/writing the memory that silence holds…[a] written record…spiralling across the pages.” Philip’s writing and performances have been recognized by multiple arts organizations including the Casas de las Américas, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Canada Council, PEN, the Modern Language Association, and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. Philip received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Queen’s University in 2022 and the Tobago Diaspora Award in 2024.
