AFK | Screenings

Distance Studies

Nada El-Omari, Noor Khan, Elizabeth M. Webb, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Tanya Lukin Linklater

Curated by: Magdalyn Asimakis

EAST, Noor Khan (2018) | image courtesy of: Kariza Santos

Proximity Study (Sight Lines), Elibazth M. Webb (2022). Video Still

from where to where من وين لوين d'où vers où, Nada El-Omari (2021). Video Still

Forty Blocks, Cheryl L'Hirondelle (1994). Video Still. Courtesy of VTape

, not like us. Not like us, Tanya Lukin Linklater (2022). Video Still. Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries

EAST

Noor Khan

CANADA | 2018 | DIGITAL | 3 MIN | ENGLISH

In East, Khan communicates the crisis of having been robbed of a homeland, while also settling and being complicit in the destruction of the home of Indigenous peoples. The film considers her responsibility as a settler since she sees no return home for herself and her community.

Location

Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC)

1411 Dufferin Street, Unit D, Toronto, ON, M6H 4C7

For a map of Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), click here

COVID-19 Policy

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.

Purchase Tickets Here

Distance Studies traces a series of relationships that exceed linear space and time. This selection of works by artists and filmmakers Noor Khan, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Elizabeth M. Webb, Nada El-Omari, and Tanya Lukin Linklater ask, what does it mean to know someone? Must they be within arm’s reach? What can we access through shared spaces? Some pose inquiries around how physical distance blurs definitions of ‘home’, while others trace distances between inhabited spaces, and still others foreground memory and familial knowledge as something immediate. These films consider what haunts us, what we embody, and what we learn about ourselves through people and spaces that are absent, or once were.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an award-winning and community-engaged interdisciplinary media artist, singer/songwriter, and critical thinker whose family is from Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wâskahikan (Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, Alberta. Her work investigates and articulates the intersections of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) and contemporary time-place incorporating sound, Indigenous languages, music, and old and new technology.

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award.

Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal. She centeres her practice and research interests on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement and the stories of belonging and identity through a poetic, hybrid lens. Her films have recently been shown at Nuit Blanche Toronto, Les Instants Vidéos, NYU’s Orphan Films Symposium, Belfast Film Festival, Palestine Cinema Days, Visions Cairo, Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and Shasha and Tenk.

Noor Khan is a community-engaged multidisciplinary artist, art director and producer. She was raised in Scarborough, born in Saudi Arabia, with roots in South Asia. She holds an M.F.A in Community Arts and a Certificate in College Teaching of Art from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), a Certificate in Digital Art from OCAD University, and a B.A. in Community Development from the University of Toronto.

Tanya Lukin Linklater's practice cites Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, structures of sustenance, and weather as an organizing force. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores and ancestral belongings in museums and elsewhere alongside dance artists, composers, and poets. Through collaboration, her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. She continues to write in relation to what she has come to call felt structures.

Nada El-Omari

Noor Khan

Elizabeth M. Webb

Cheryl L’Hirondelle

Tanya Lukin Linklater

Presented With:

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all.

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us.

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.