Images Festival 2024 | Leaky Gardens

“Leaky Gardens” considers the uncontainability of edges and borders alongside the work of three artists who currently reside in so-called Canada.

Screen-recorded on her computer, Eve Tagny’s documentary-style film Of Roses [how to embody the layers of time] Fragments of a bibliography delves into the historical, political, social, and symbolic context of roses as well as the geopolitical consequences of the rose market. Images, videos, recordings, and texts are presented as primary sources to build a multi-vocal model of the world of these flowers, from the garden to the home.

While Eve problematizes the rose garden popularized by settlers on Turtle Island, Yza Nouiga considers in Jardins Paradise who has access to gardens and what a garden for the people, particularly those of the Arab diaspora, might look like. Yza prompts the question: In what ways might a garden enforce and designate class, access, and ability, and define who has the right to leisure?

In both of these cases, the garden is conceived of as something in service—to a body, a community, a politic, an ideology… However, in Writing Landscape Vanessa Dion Fletcher plays with the ways the landscape is written onto the body and suggests that the body may in turn write with, as opposed to on, the landscape. Vanessa traverses coast lines and rock edges wearing handmade copper shoes. Land marks the plated footwear, which is then inked, printed onto paper, and now shared alongside the videos through the print's inclusion in this catalogue. In a way, the marks made by the land become landmarks in and of themselves; the intaglio print then becomes an effigy to the possibility of being in right relationship with the land.

The films presented in “Leaky Gardens” begin to address the complexity of gardens and all that might pass through them. The porosity of the garden will be further explored in the 2023 Images Festival in a compilation program entitled “Leakier Gardens”.

— This program is part of the suite ok to rest curated by Jaclyn Quaresma.

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.