Alia Ayman, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por in conversation with Lukas Brasiskis

As with last year’s 33rd edition, the 34th edition of Images Festival was presented entirely online. In their programming note for Images Festival 2021, the programming collective (Alia Ayman, Sara Constant, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por) wrote: “As four strangers brought together to envision this year’s program, our thinking has been informed by the conditions of isolation and uncertainty that have become hallmarks of our realities after the world went virtual last spring. As the days melt into one another, creating a long continuum of sameness, we found inspiration in the idea and practice of repetition. Between what occurred and what is yet to come is an endless loop of recurrence, in which the same patterns resurface and structural limitations threaten to restrict and homogenize our thinking about what’s possible. But repetition is never exact, and while patterns are generally stifling, they can also become ways through which we can imagine alternatives.”

In this recoded interview, programmers Alia Ayman, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por discuss this year’s edition with e-flux Video & Film associate curator Lukas Brasiskis, including the ideas and intentions that shaped their programming, the challenges of collaborating remotely, and the films they picked for e-flux audiences.

The conversation is presented as part of e-flux Video & Film’s special feature of Images Festival 2021, accompanying a two-week group screening of short films by Rossella Biscotti, Grau, Darol Olu Kae, Nour Ouayda, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Rina B. Tsou—streaming on e-flux Vidoe & Film from Saturday, May 29 through Friday, June 11. Watch them here.

The program is part of the series Festival Forum on e-flux Video & Film, presenting collaborations with established and emerging moving-image festivals from around the world.

Images Festival 2021 Programming Collective are Alia Ayman, Robert Lee, Yasmin Nurming-Por (programmers), and Sara Constant (facilitator).

Alia Ayman is a film and moving image curator living and working between Cairo, New York, and Philadelphia. She is a cofounder of the Cairo-based Zawya Cinema, a program advisor for Berlinale Forum, and a co-programmer of the 2020 Flaherty NYC series. Ayman is currently a doctoral candidate at New York University where she is working towards a dissertation on decoloniality, difference, and the global circulation of documentary images.

Robert Lee is a Toronto-based video artist, writer, translator, and programmer.

Yasmin Nurming-Por is a curator and writer based in Ontario. Recent exhibitions include National Museum of Women in the Arts (2020); Alberta Foundation for the Arts (2017); Banff Centre for Art and Creativity (2017); Art Gallery of Guelph (2017); Video Pool (2017); Trinity Square Video (2015); AKA artist-run (2015); and grunt gallery (2015) amongst others. She has held curatorial research positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff). Her writing has appeared in Canadian Art, c magazine, esse arts + opinions, and Inuit Art Quarterly. Her research is currently preoccupied by questions of representation in museum art collections.

Sara Constant is a musician and arts worker with a background in experimental music. Sara’s performance practice and research focus on ecological theory, cultural identity, and materiality in experimental electronic music. Active as a classical flutist, improviser, and ensemble musician, she has performed at festivals/series in Canada, Sweden, Austria, France, and the United States, as well as in self-organized projects in Toronto and Montreal. Sara is based in Toronto, where she works as a flutist, writer, and educator. She currently curates a concert series at the Music Gallery focused on early-career experimental artists, and from 2016-2019 co-organized the Toronto Creative Music Lab—a professional development workshop for composers, performers, and ensembles.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.