Black Spatiality

June 20th - Sept 15th 2023

Curratorial Statement:

Featuring the work of Raoul Olou, Ayo Tsalithaba, Ghislan Sutherland-Timm and Tamara Jones

In place : Black Spatiality explores black placemaking across borders and boundaries, with a focus on the diasporic Toronto context. These filmmakers assert the presence of their communities and stories in a City which seeks to render them invisible. 

I came to know these filmmakers and their work through the creation of the Black Experimental Film Festival. These films remind me of Toronto and the ways in which we come to make a place for ourselves within it. Glass towers have engulfed our city. As we look up to the sky, the horizon is ever-changing. I feel that we are finding ourselves at a real rupture. Between governmental neglect, corruption, gentrification and the cost of living crisis, community and mutual aid feels like the only thing we can turn to. I feel we can turn to art too.  

Each of these artists assuage my anxieties about where we are going and how we might remember ourselves. They remind me that blackness is vast and connected. They remind me that the act of remembering, keeping, naming is life-giving. 

I hope you feel that way too. 

- Curator, Nala Haileselassie

Featured Artists

  • Raoul Olou is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. He creates work that references personal experiences, race, ontology, intuition, and anthropologie inspired by quantum physics and speculative fiction.

    His film “Oakwood Village, A map is not a place” is a reminder that maps are unable to truly represent places, emotions, and the lives of folks that inhabit or transit through them.

  • Ayo Tsalithaba is a visual artist, writer and researcher from Ghana and Lesotho and based in Toronto. Their primary mediums include film, photography and illustration. Their work explores questions of home, (in)visibility, liminality and (un)belonging as they relate to Black queer and trans* African diasporic subjectivity.

    They’re work “Atmospheric Arrivals” is a living multimedia archival project and poly-temporal memory bank. I forge a unique and dynamic practice of return through active memory and revisiting my personal archive.

  • Ghislan Sutherland-Timm (they/she) is a multidisciplinary moving image artist is influenced by their ancestral ties and reconnection to their Afro-Caribbean heritage and Carib roots. While ignited by the ephemerality and tactility of sound and film, Sutherland-Timm seeks to unravel the mythologies and romanticization of home and homecoming in their practice.

    In part of an ongoing autobiographical-fictional collection entitled “Why is water so heavy?” (c.2022-present), interlocking the fluidity and borderless nature of water in relation to diaspora and landmarking. They dwell on self-ambiguity as time continues to spatialize fragments of their ancestral histories and cultural practices lost in water.

  • Tamara Jones is a writer, curator, and artist based in Tkaronto. A former film publicist, they’ve worked with the South Western International Film Festival, Elevation Pictures, Warner Bros., and NEON. Their writing has been published by Ephemera Magazine, Adolescent Content, and The Globe and Mail. They are a self-taught filmmaker.

    They’re film “This is a Crisis” features a faceless bureaucrat traipses around Toronto repurposing hostile architecture as their personal playground. Splicing audio of Mayor John Tory’s election night victory speeches, this experimental movement piece offers critical commentary on navigating procedural obstacles, surveillance and criminalization of poverty, and what cities lose when they leave the most marginalized behind.