Commission Details

Spring 2023
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Annual trailer commissioned by Images Festival from Artist Nour Bishouty.
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Lead Curator: Jaclyn Quaresma
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Images Festival Toronto
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For the Images Festival: (G)host catalogue please click here.

Images Festival annually commissions a new trailer from a contemporary experimental moving image artist in response to that year’s there. The 2023 Images Festival presented a nestling of two concepts: ghost and host. Though inlaid, these two words suggest entirely separate ontological states: one of spiritual liminality—an ethereal in-between on the way to elsewhere and the other consequential, rooted and embodied. This complexity echoes the stuff of moving images: present yet past, visible yet elsewhere, physical yet representative. And, despite their veracity, moving images can evoke powerful emotional responses. The medium itself does away with temporal binaries; a sort of once was and here and now sit together in ripe tension. A theme such as (G)hosts invites you to consider the links between spectrality and moving image culture, both in form and in content. [1]

Entwined, ghost and host have equal footing in the programs presented at the 36th Images Festival. Together they not only ask “What remains?”, but also “where might we find it?” One might wonder about a spirit’s complex tethers: Can one conjure or haunt without a location, whether a body, place, or through an object? What or who can act as a host? What might the role of a host be, if not to receive something or someone? Must a thing be received (as opposed to perceived) in order to exist? Do only phantoms haunt? Can one conjure more than a memory? To engage with (G)hosts is to suspend disbelief, at least for a short while. As Jacques Derrida said, “you believe without believing, but this believing without believing remains a believing.” If this is the case, it leads me to wonder: is faith a pillar of moving image culture?

Nour Bishouty responded to this theme and produced the 2023 Images Festival Trailer under the theme of (G)host.

1. In a casual interview with the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, Jacques Derrida speaks about the “links between spectrality and filmmaking.” Images Festival is expanding this original connection beyond cinema and filmmaking to encompass moving images as a whole.

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Nour Bishouty is an interdisciplinary artist working across media including video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing. Her work engages with histories and narratives of place and poses questions around dissonance, opacity, legibility, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally including at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2022); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2017); Casa Arabe, Madrid (2016); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2015); the Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); and the Beirut Art Centre, Beirut (2014). Her artist book 1—130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan, edited by Jacob Korczynsci, was co-published in 2020 by Art Metropole (Toronto) and Motto Books (Berlin). Upcoming exhibitions include La biennale de Québec (Feb 2024).