Performance: A Smile Split by the Stars
For a map of Gallery 44, click here
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.
Join us for a poetry reading with m. nourbeSe philip, continuing the conversation inspired by the exhibition. This special event invites philip to read her work, followed by a celebratory set from DJ TAMIKA. Together, poetry and sound will reverberate through the exhibition that is dedicated to philip’s writing, expanding and deepening the relationship between text, sound and space.
A Smile Split by the Stars is a collaborative narration of m. nourbeSe philip’s poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Working within, across and beyond colonial lexicons—the installation reads philip’s poem through and as different audio-visual-textual moments of revolutionary intent, wherein Black girlhood and Black femininity are, a priori (‘from what is earlier’), re-coding the aesthetic promises of modernity.
Exhibition and Programs in partnership and co-produced with Agnes Etherington Art Centre and Modern Fuel. Co-presented with Images Festival, the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University and the Revolutionary Demand for Happiness Working Group.
m. nourbeSe philip
m. nourbeSe philip was born in Trinidad and Tobago and educated at the University of West Indies, Mona, receiving a B.Sc. in Economics. She took graduate degrees in Political Science and Law at the University of Western Ontario and practiced law in Toronto for seven years before turning to a career in the arts, primarily as a poet, novelist, and essayist. Spanning the fields of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, English Literature, decolonial thought, and studies of poetic form and language, her work as an intellectual and poet considers how the displacement of Black people, within and in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery, has provided the conditions to express alternative forms of being that breach longstanding practices of dehumanization and racism. Philip has written 15 acclaimed books in different genres (essays, poetry, novels, plays) and her writings have been commissioned for 22 literary anthologies. While all her writings are commendable, her long cycle poem, Zong! is her most lauded. In 2014, Jenny Sharpe described the poem as “a new and different kind of speech/language for speaking/writing the memory that silence holds…[a] written record…spiralling across the pages.” Philip’s writing and performances have been recognized by multiple arts organizations including the Casas de las Américas, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Canada Council, PEN, the Modern Language Association, and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. Philip received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Queen’s University in 2022 and the Tobago Diaspora Award in 2024.
Tamika Bernard
Tamika Bernard is a movement coach and multidisciplinary creative hailing from New York City and currently based in Toronto. Her personal and professional practices are rooted in a holistic inclusion of identity and experience. She uses music, video and other digital media to promote alternate, creative approaches to movement.
