Images Festival: a City in Pursuit

How might a city fail? Who determines which factors contribute to its success? Its livability? Which principles determine what is monitored and measured? Whose wants, needs, sorrows, dreams, and desires are considered? What is a city in pursuit of? And who decides?

Artist Tamara Jones’ moving image practice engages research and site-specific performance. In This is a Crisis, an anonymous bureaucrat traipses across the City of Toronto, activating public sites with their body. John Tory’s bombastic victory speeches throughout his nine years as Toronto’s mayor are broadcast over the gentle movements. As he makes unkept, cross-partisan promises of progress, safety, and livability, the bureaucrat dances, repurposing the hostile city as their personal playground.

In 1962, Oscar Niemeyer, a leader in the development of Modernist architecture, was invited to conceive an international fairground in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon. Though construction began, the project was abandoned during the country’s civil war and the fairgrounds were never completed. Joyce Joumaa’s film To Remain in the No Longer considers how architecture operates in its failed state, and reflects on Lebanon’s current socio-economic crisis by examining the monument to modernism as it exists in current-day Tripoli.

As Tamara and Joyce individually tease out the fallacy of progress, the works in this program refuse to separate the city, its infrastructure, and architecture from those who inhabit it.

Please join us for a conversation following the screening with artists Tamara Jones, Joyce Joumaa, and Director of Photography, William Albu.

Screenings

This is a Crisis

Tamara Jones
Canada | 2023 | Digital | 4 MIN 20 SEC | English

Featuring spliced audio of Mayor John Tory’s 2014, 2018, and 2022 victory speeches, an anonymous bureaucrat turns hostile architecture into a personal playground. This is a Crisis is an experimental work of video art offering critical commentary on procedural obstacles, surveillance, and criminalization of poverty as well as what cities lose when they leave the most marginalized behind.

كیف لا نغرق في السراب, To Remain in the No Longer

Joyce Joumaa
Canada/ Lebanon | 2023 | Digital | 38 MIN | Arabic with English subtitles

To Remain in the No Longer examines the architectural, social, and political significance of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s abandoned fairground in Tripoli, Lebanon. Drawing together archival materials, interviews with local people, 16mm and digital images of the buildings as they stand today, the film reflects on both the fraught history of this site and its connection to Lebanon’s ongoing financial crisis.

Artists

Joyce Joumaa

Joyce Joumaa is a video artist based between Beirut and Montreal. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment.

Tamara Jones

Tamara Jones is a writer and artist based in Tkaronto (Toronto) and Yelamu (San Francisco). Their research and site-specific video performance art practice uses experimental docu-fiction and sculpture to explore bureaucratic architecture and the politics of play and public space. This is a Crisis is their first public work.