Slut Island Festival — 8th edition
© Photo Credits: Still from UNDR, directed by Kamal Aljafari, 2024.
The Clouds, They Look Like Mountains
Slut Island Festival presents The Clouds, They Look Like Mountains — an art exhibition curated by Nasrin Himada
Exhibition from October 19 to October 26, 2024. This exhibition is free, but you can book tickets to all other Slut Island events / make a donation via this link.
Opening reception on October 23 from 5 to 9 PM
“The eight edition of Slut Island Festival is here for Fall 2024 (after a long hiatus following the COVID edition in 2020). In times of unending grief and peril, we owe it to the movement to resist despair. Art and music divorced from the commercial sphere will always be a vehicle for messaging that begs to be heard, and which has the power to invigorate us. We will congregate with expanded lenses, confirmed suspicions and new perspectives, undoubtedly (re)shaped and shattered by ongoing tyranny abroad and at home.
May this edition be honest and, if nothing more, an opportunity for camaraderie, education and exchange. Calling all truth seekers who refuse to look away or normalize that which disgusts us! To queer, trans and working class musings against imperialism in all of its forms. We hope to see you there.” Slut Island Festival
Curated by Nasrin Himada | Curatorial Statement | 2024
The phrase The Clouds, They Look Like Mountains came to me while I was on the train back to Montreal in mid-July, during an unrelenting heatwave. Gazing out the window, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a cloud formation that morphed into the shape of a mountain. In that brief moment, I felt connected to the sky, as if tuned into an experience of pure feeling. Gazing, daydreaming, and letting our minds wander—these are simple acts we often take for granted. It reminded me of something Chanda Prescod-Weinstein once shared about Ahed Tamimi, who, when asked what she missed most in prison, said: "gazing at the stars." Similarly, the artists in this exhibition invite us to explore the sky’s perspective—through a camera’s eye that imposes control and possession, the migratory pathways of birds, the mythological tale of a salt pillar, and responses from poets who add context and vision to what is being shared and experienced. With a special artist edition that sutures these elements into a sensory experience, the exhibition reminds us of the delicate ways in which freedoms are felt, and what we're fighting for is more than just survival.
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page.
Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events
Slut Island Festival is a community initiative that seeks to create space for marginalized artists within the local and national cultural scene, resist processes of tokenization and commodification and contribute to the development and maintenance of anti-oppressive community networks. With this mandate at the forefront of our curatorial process, we will present the eighth edition of the festival in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory Montreal, QC).
Each year, the festival is curated by the two co-founders and a group of hired jury members who share the desire to claim agency in constructing a festival program informed by their experiences of marginalization, misrepresentation within or alienation from both institutional and D.I.Y. music/art scenes as a result of their sexual, racial, class, and/or gender identities. Slut Island Festival continues to run, validate and disseminate the work of worthy and talented artists who face systemic barriers through dignified programming, proper compensation, acknowledgement and celebration.
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long term friendships and by their many on-going collaborations with artists, filmmakers and poets. Nasrin’s recent project, For Many Returns, experiments with writing as an act dictated by love, and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire as transformation and liberation through many forms. Nasrin currently holds the position of Associate Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in Kingston (ON).
M. NOURBESE PHILIP Born in Tobago, M. NOURBESE PHILIP is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and public intellectual who lives in the spacetime of Toronto. Her published works include the seminal She Tries Her Tongue;Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative quest narrative in prose and poetry Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence; the young-adult novel Harriet’s Daughter; the play Coups and Calypsos; and the epic, book-length poem Zong!. She has authored four collections of essays, the most recent of which is BlanK. Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio). Among her awards are the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature (USA); and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. In Winter 2023 she was the Bain-Swiggett Chair in Poetry at Princeton University as well as being awarded an honorary doctorate by Queens University. In 2024 she was awarded the Windham-Campbell prize in poetry.
Berlin Reed is an independent curator, author, community organizer, and chef based outside of Tiohtià:Ke//Montréal. A Brooklyn transplant raised near Seattle, his roots in the language of gastronomy sprouted in 2009. Berlin established himself by curating multi-dimensional pop-ups in artistic ecosystems from San Francisco to Brooklyn to Montreal.
Berlin creates space for interactions between multiple disciplines without regard for conventional lines between curator and artist, always seeking to clear space for a more challenging, engaging, and immersive audience experience. His installations take advantage of the ability to iniltrate the viewer’s world through sensorial works that transmute abstract concepts into deeply personal physical experience. Berlin’s creative research currently focuses on the relationship between the senses and our emotions and memory.
Tamer Hassan has screened his films internationally including at Viennale, Lincoln Center's Art of the Real, Cinéma du Réel, Mar Del Plata, Sheffield DocFest and Punto de Vista. He teaches at Parsons School of Design.
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker renowned for his distinctive approach to cinema. After studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, he now resides in Berlin, Germany. Aljafari has shared his expertise in filmmaking through teaching positions at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. His contributions to the field were recognised with fellowships at the Film Study Center - Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and most recently at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University 2024-2025. In May 2024, IndieLisboa will highlight his contributions to cinema by dedicating its retrospective Section to his work and it will take place at the Portuguese cinematheque. Additionally, his installation “The Camera of the Dispossessed” was showcased at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023). His film “A Fidai Film” won the Grand Jury Prize Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Réel 2024, and the GNCR/Ciné+ Distribution Support Prize/ Renaud Victor Prize at FID Marseille. He is currently developing a fiction film, “Beirut 1931”, set to be shot in Jaffa.
Parastoo Anoushahpour (Iran / Canada) is an artist originally from Tehran now based in Toronto working predominantly with film, video and installation. She was an artist in residence at the Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation (Jordan), Tabakalera International Center for Contemporary Art (Spain), Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), and Banff Center for Arts & Creativity (Canada). Her recent solo and collaborative work has been shown at Berlinale, MoMA, The Flaherty Film Seminar, Punto de Vista Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Viennale, NYFF, TIFF, Images Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Experimenta (Bangalore), and Media City Film Festival. Since 2013 she has been working in collaboration with Ryan Ferko and Faraz Anoushahpour. Their shared practice explores the tension of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist.