AFK | Screenings

dreamworlds

Kamal Aljafari, Basel Abbas, NIC Kay, Rhayne Vermette, Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Sky Hopinka, Tacita Dean

Curated by: Nasrin Himada

Backlit hands placing various sheets of transparents colorful abstract images overlapping on top of each other creating new colors and patterns.

Sandy landscape on a blue, sunny day. There is an explosion coloured in pink and purple tones at the center of the landscape.

Predominantly black images with slivers of light peeking through, as if looking through blinds.

Black background with sans serif white text of the word “Wait.”

Green Ray

Tacita Dean

2001 | 16MM | 3 MIN

“When the sun sets into a clear crisp horizon, and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles, and no distant moisture that could become, at the final moment, a backlit cloud that obscures the opportunity, you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray.” -Tacita Dean.

Location

Innis Town Hall

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 of Innis Town Hall, 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.

Filmmakers make the light. There is always poetry in images and images in poetry: imagination, desire, steadfastness, and liberation are entangled into material manifestations of scenes, vignettes, soundscapes, lightscapes, stillness, and rhythm. The films and videos in dreamworlds are thought of as material possibilities in which worlds appear that are made up of dreams; worlds dreamt in daylight, in rumination; worlds that follow an intuition through movement, dance, and protest. Dreaming is the condition whereby forms emerge as relation, as our love for the land, and as liberation: in unexpected cuts, speeds, scratches, interruptions, fragments, blurs, a green ray. There’s an intimacy here that corresponds to the image’s vibrancy, dynamism, and beat. Images are light.

A conversation between Nasrin Himada and Wanda Nanibush will follow the screening.

Kamal Aljafari

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. He attended the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin, Germany. His most recent work, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, premiered at Corti d’Autore in the Locarno Film Festival 2022. He just completed A Fidai Film and is preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

Basel Abbas

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality.

NIC Kay

NIC Kay is a dancer, performer, conceptual choreographer, and all-around artist. Using creative movement, performing arts history, and performance art theory, they explore the themes of relationality and yearning in their work.

Rhayne Vermette

Rhayne Vermette is an artist and filmmaker born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba. Her filmmaking practice has been described as opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, re-enactments, and divine interruption. She lives in Winnipeg.

Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) b. Ferndale, Washington, is currently based in Vancouver, BC, and Milwaukee, WI. He studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centres around personal positions of Indigenous landscape, language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable.

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965) was born in Canterbury, England. She attended the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, Greece, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She has produced works in various media, including sculpture, photography, and woodwork. Some of her unique and renowned creations, however, have involved the use of film as portrait. By projecting a series of frames, each blown up and lit to her own specifications, Dean makes the celluloid film itself the subject over and above the action in the film.

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.