Program Details
Thursday, June 29 – Saturday, July 29, 2023
—
Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
—
Work by Erin Johnson, Gabi Dao, Véronique Sunatori, Yuula Benivolski, Zaina Bseiso
—
Images Festival, Toronto
VTape, Toronto
—
This program was adapted and travelled as a film screening to e-flux, New York.
—
Documentation by Jessann Reece
—
Poster design my Mohammad Rezaei and saam keshmiry.
Images Festival presents the exhibition Leakier Gardens, which includes the work of Erin Johnson, Gabi Dao, Véronique Sunatori, Yuula Benivolski, and Zaina Bseiso.
Together, the artists consider multiple forms of nourishment, sustenance, and cultural transference across bodies, territories and generational lines. Alongside these works, the garden extends beyond the plot to include those porous spaces in our lives that require tending to the growth of (one) another, allow entanglements to flourish and where fruit, flower, and seed demand attention and care– not from a master gardener– but through each cultural leakage, slippage, spill and spoil.
Download poster here.
List of Works
Erin Johnson, Oranges, 2023 | Three channel video | 3 MIN loop | No Dialogue.
A group of artists engage in collective queer, desirous, and improvisational exchanges while eating oranges on a rooftop. The video reflects on feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”
Directed and co-produced by: Erin Johnson
Director of photography: Charlotte Prager
Sound design + edit: Charlotte Prager
Featuring: Genesis Baez, Anika Cartterfield, Kamron Hazel, Kanthy Peng, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy
Gabi Dao, Coco Means Ghost, 2019 | Single-channel video | 25 MIN |Vietnamese with English subtitles.
Gabi Dao’s video-poem layers archival fragments, individual and family recollections, and lingering questions linked to Vietnam, unfolding narratives about intergenerational memory—both its legible recordings and its deeply visceral textures. How we remember, less so what, becomes a gateway into somatic residues, which spill from the gaps of official archives and constructed histories.
Véronique Sunatori, Where the Forest Ends, 2023. Installation (detail).
Where the Forest Ends evokes a threshold where a place of darkness and confusion turns to clarity. This body of work uses the ‘language of flowers’ relative to my personal history and mental health. Citing the traditional Japanese practice of hanakotoba, in which plants were given meaning, this investigation into my roots takes the shape of a chrysanthemum. It is at once a shrine to the beautiful perennial, and likewise, a manifestation of emotional withering. -Véronique Sunatori
Yuula Benivolski, Eclipse in the Garden, 2021. 8MM>Digital, 6MIN. Russian with English subtitles.
Yuula Benivolski’s mother always wanted a garden, and now she has one. Eclipse in the Garden is a poem about the relationship between a name and a place. Tatars and other non-Russian communities in the USSR were forced to go through Russification—the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions. Forcing the many minority groups within the USSR to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination and separatism. As a result, many people including the filmmaker’s mother weren’t able to use their mother tongue, eventually forgetting it.
Zaina Bseiso, When Light is Displaced, 2023 | Digital Video | 6MIN | Arabic with English subtitles.
Interested in its parallels with the fate of the Jaffa oranges, the filmmaker speaks to her father about her intention to film the last orange grove in Los Angeles. Their disagreement transforms the grove into a space of contemplation on the politics of storytelling in the multi-generational experience of Palestine in exile.
Jaclyn Quaresma 