Spring Summer 2022
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Lead Curator: Jaclyn Quaresma
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Images Festival Toronto
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For the Images Festival: Slow Edition catalogue please click here.

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I would like to introduce myself to the Images Festival
community. My name is Jaclyn Quaresma. I am a second
generation Portuguese descendant, born in Tkáron:to,
Turtle Island. My grandparents called Pico, Azores, and
Nadadouro, Portugal home. I come to the Programming
Director role with a background in contemporary art and
curation and am honoured to have your support in this
position.

Both before and upon taking this role, I have found myself
uneasily contending with the past and present histories
of the organizations we, creative practitioners working in
cultural fields, continue to organize our respective practices around, alongside, with, and through.

When considering public programming, I often think
about how a small act of tenderness is sometimes the
most radical, and how both sharing and making space
for the vulnerability necessary for tenderness require
immense bravery. I think about the environs and systems
upholding the societal structures that make these gentle
acts dangerous ones, the hegemonic forces that label
them as weak, unimportant, disruptive of the smooth
flow of progress (don’t make a fuss), or simply too luxurious.

And these very same systems replace the joy and
love required for vulnerability with anxiety and fear. I think
about the disobedience that is often necessary to create
a space for a more radical softness, a risk for both those
who require that space and those who hold it. I think of
this active vulnerability as a transgressive praxis and of
the call for transgression at every step, risk be damned.
I think about how this risk is not equally weighted or equitably
distributed, and how it shouldn’t be a risk at all.

But I also think about softness misplaced, misguided,
misgendered, and the harms therein. I think about the
essential, not-so-soft edges of boundaries and those
best intentions that lack enough guidance, consultation,
and consent. I think about the necessity for repair and
the simultaneous impossibility of it.

Joining an organization that is two years into the process
of reassessing, restructuring, and unlearning, as well as
in the beginning stages of mending, I ask myself: Can one
tend to the past and future simultaneously without ignoring
what is happening here, now? Who gains when care-based
models are adapted to accommodate linear progress?
Must the show go on? According to whose schedule? And
at whose pace? How then are pace, progress, and harm
linked? What might it look like for an organization to slow
down? And what transgressive possibilities can slowness
as both a method and subject matter provide a festival, a
program, an exhibition, a screening?

For this year’s Images Festival, we have invited curators
Claudia Mattos, Call Again (Henry Heng Lu, Weibin Wang,
Winnie Wu), Amin Alsaden, Bouchra Assou, Marifel
Catalig, Jesse Cumming, Lauren Gabrielle Fournier, Kerry-Ann
James, and Fatma Hendawy to join us in thinking about the
generative possibilities of transgression, tenderness, and slowness.
Together we welcome you to the Slow Edition.

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ok to rest

Slow in both concept and form, Images Festival has untethered
the typical seven-to-ten-day festival schedule. The 2022 Slow
Edition presents a program of exhibitions and screenings dispersed across four months. Pared down and stretched out, the Images Festival program
consists of guest-curated screenings and a suite of connected
exhibitions and filmic explorations curated by Images Festival
Programming Director Jaclyn Quaresma.

Titled ok to rest, the suite considers the festival’s theme of slowness, tenderness, and transgression through multiple, singular
bodies of work. Across eight programs, the publics are given the
opportunity to delve deeper into the practices of artists and filmmakers who are able to show multiple works over the duration of
the drawn-out festival and its platforms.

ok to rest opens with an exhibition titled Do You Know Why the
Waves Break? featuring the work of Myriam Rey, Laïla Mestari,
and Alyssa Alikpala. The filmmaker and two artists set the tone
for the suite, foregrounding the importance of making space for
the many embodied forms of knowing and contemplation.

Following that, Sharlene Bamboat’s feature film If From Every
Tongue it Drips sensually considers the diasporic tongue as
one that is in a constant state of translation, and that translation
itself is an act of poetry. With Rekhti poetry at is centre, the film
considers the queer body as one that simultaneously resists the
colonial narrative and is historically erased from it. Consisting of
digital age bric-à-brac, video recordings taken on the mobile
devices of the two main characters are interspersed throughout
the film.

Similarly, I Can Hear My Echo presents the work of Heehyun
Choi, Sara Cwynar, and Laïla Mestari, who consider the everyday
image, the media used to capture it, and one’s own way of organizing and then sharing their personal collection or archive of images. This online screening borrows its title from Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s 1974
video Boomerang, which Serra describes as “… a tape which analyzes
its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized.”
In I Can Hear My Echo, images are treated as joyful echoes, reverberations of both the image’s author, and the person who captured it.

With compassion at its core, a soft landing celebrates the slow
process of coming together while still adjusting one’s comfort
levels in the current phase of the pandemic. The in-person
exhibition will be held at Gallery TPW and is host to the artwork
of by Alyssa Alikpala, Alize Zorlutuna, Erika DeFreitas, Rihab
Essayh, and Eve Tagny.

Leaky Gardens includes the festival’s second feature-length
film: Of Roses [how to embody the layers of time] Fragments of
a bibliography, which is visual artist Eve Tagny’s first documentary-style
film. Accompanied by short films by Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Writing Landscape) and Yza Nouiga (Jardins Paradise), Leaky Gardens
complicates the notion of the garden as a gentle refuge and reveals its colonial roots. This in-cinema screening is accompanied by an intaglio print by Vanessa Dion Fletcher located on page 40 of this digital catalogue.

Rebellious Flesh came to be as a result of a collaboration
between Jaclyn Quaresma and Breath and Death Guide Marifel
Catalig. Films by Xiaolu Wang, Joie Estrella Horwitz, Min-Wei
Ting, and Erika DeFreitas contemplate the relationship one has
with death, mourning, fear, and grief, as well as the mystical possibilities of the thresholds between breath and body, youth and
their elders, the living and those who have passed. Throughout
the screening, Marifel will host collective meditation on breath
with the in-cinema audience.

Blue I & II consist of the suite’s largest screening of short
films and an accompanying feature, all of which complete a slow,
detailed mediation on the colour blue. Heehyun Choi, Emily
Pelstring, Serena Lee, Syd Farrington, Márcio Cruz, Chelsea
Phillips-Carr, Anna Hawkins and Derek Jarman each contemplate
one’s historical tethers, whether sexual, personal, biological, or
aesthetic, alongside the colour blue. This screening is accompanied by a text that is grounded by a mineral exploration of the
various pigments of that colour.

El Lado Quieto, directed by Miko Revereza & Carolina Fusilier,
is the suite’s final feature-length film, which closes ok to rest
with a look at a world after. Looking from the point of view of the
Siyokoy, a Filipinx mythical creature, audiences watch as they
wander among the architectural remains of Capaluco, a now
unpopulated Mexican island that was once a bustling resort.

ok to rest, as a whole, is a reflection on the question: If the show
must go on, how might it be more kind, more generous, more
available, and more loving towards its myriad composers, publics, participants, and their positionalities? The exhibitions and the in-cinema and online screenings that are offered through ok to rest intervene, alter, and subtly disrupt the atmosphere of the traditional festival model, creating space for slowness, for tender transgressions, for rest