A graduate of OCAD University’s Integrated Media program, Sutherland-Timm is also an alum of the Independent Imaging Retreat: Film Farm (2024) and Black Women Film! Canada (2019). Their acclaimed work has been showcased at major venues and festivals, including Sankofa Square, Toronto Queer Film Festival, InsideOut 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, and Nia Centre for the Arts in collaboration with McMaster Museum of Art, to name a few.

For this year’s Images Festival, they curated ‘our bodies hold time,’ a program featuring nine student-made films that disassemble and collage cinematic time.

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The Produced: Hi Ghislan, thank you so much for being here!

​Ghislan Sutherland-Timm: Thanks for having me!

​I’d love to use your program note, ‘our bodies hold time,’ as our starting point. You beautifully articulated how our presence in time is marked by the textures of land, body, artifact, and all the different shapes that they take. How do you personally observe these things in your own body and mind? How do they hold time for you?

I think a lot about the textures of rust, dust, mold, wrinkles. The older I get, the more my relationship with time evolves, and I find it easier to decenter the body and the self. Now, my focus is shifted towards my relationship with the planet. Much of the work I take on and embody comes from nature and from a less human-focused perspective, in a sense.

Taking in all these sensibilities, can you talk more about channeling them into your curating process, specifically, with your work with the Images Festival this year?

I found that many of my ideas dealt with the tangibility of time. During the curation, I was looking at folks who explore their relationships with time through archives. The program name, ‘our bodies hold time,’ came from the census of how we intake time, perceive it, and digest it in all different ways.

These films weave through various elements of nature and land, with the temporality of production serving as a major theme. How did you determine their sequence to guide the audience through the specific journey you envisioned?

As you mentioned, land, objects, and humans are central to this program. I think these films share an organic quality, forming a synergy as they transition from one to the next. We begin with a focus on the land in Gorg O Mish (Twilight) by Radin Khodadadi and Fragments of by Elena Calvo Polo. The journey then shifts with the third film, Alley by Defne Kırmızı, where the camera becomes an extension of the body, a body part. Near the end, I wanted the focus to shift to the personal aspect of archiving time, with more intimate and family-oriented films. We end the program with Herida (Wounded Gazelle) by Diana Esther, a recitation of the mother’s diary entries, which shows an inherited relationship with time or negotiation with time through someone else’s archives.

As an interdisciplinary artist yourself, how did this background shape your curatorial approach to this program? Were there any materials, ideas or texts that anchor ‘our bodies hold time’?

Absolutely. One of the texts I really dived into was “Sculpting in Time” in the book Reflections on the Cinema by Andrey Tarkovsky, which discusses the relationship between the subject and the camera. Another important book shared with me by Images Festival’s Programming Director, Jaclyn Quaresma, was Post-Cinematic Bodies by Shane Denson. It helps guide me through thinking about metabolizing film within the broader scope of images.

Regarding my background, working across many areas of the art scene has given me diverse perspectives and points of departure for my curatorial process, which shape my work both directly and indirectly. For example, I often understand film through the lens of poetry. For me, they’re all connected and threaded together.

For you, what does it mean to metabolize moving images?

​When the theme metabolizing moving images was first introduced to me, it was simultaneously familiar and difficult to pinpoint where it sits in my practice and in my relationship with film. I intuitively understood parts of it, yet I couldn’t quite articulate them through language. It was fascinating to pull from texts and materials while discussing with Jacqueline how to bring those ideas forward. I hesitated to take a more literal interpretation of the concept of “metabolizing.” I thought about, perhaps, it’s less about the body; maybe it’s just time within itself. But somehow I eventually found a way to circle back to the body. I hope that answers your questions.

Totally. It’s interesting to hear about how you personally pull out the vignettes and contours of this overarching theme. When I was going through those films, there was also an aspect of memories disintegrating through rites of passage, migration, and evolving relationships. Perhaps it is already telling, through how you structure these films, but how do you personally negotiate your own relationship with time?

I’d say time has this ability of being simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, embodied and disembodied. Within my own practice, as well as in relation to this program, we don’t experience time in a linear path. It’s interesting to observe how time is like a collage in experience, how it can be romanticized and distorted, or an avenue of healing. In other cases, it can also become a scar.

​The program’s title, ‘our bodies hold time,’ is both straightforward and fertile for interpretation. Could you speak more about the decision behind this title and why you chose not to capitalize it?

​I’m usually married to a title first before bringing in the thesis and content. But, for this program, I initially had a hard time coming up with the title because, while I knew what I wanted to convey, I didn’t have the words to articulate it. Even while writing the statement, organizing the films, and contending with the works that folks had offered, I was trying to figure out how to be articulate without being too direct or obvious.

What were some other names you were considering?

​One of it was “Crevice of Our Becoming,” which felt a bit too vague or overly poetic. I was thinking about how we contend with the “becoming”of time and how we experience it in the present and the past at the same time. I wanted to convey all of that, but eventually, I realized I needed to settle on something more direct. I kept coming back to “our bodies hold time” and realized that maybe the obvious answer was the right one.

​As for not capitalizing the title, for me, this choice feels more personal. Capitalization can feel very formal, and I like the idea of titles feeling like passing notes. It’s the closest thing to a handwritten note you can get. Keeping it lowercase felt more organic and intimate, as opposed to those standard formal vibes. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of capitalization in general.

On the note of giving an impression, what do you want the audience to walk away with after seeing the program? Whether it’s an immediate response, perhaps temporarily suspending their sense of time to metabolize the images within that fixed duration of watching the films together in one place, or an overarching message you want them to brim and brew with.

My ambition is to decentralize western ideas of time, leaning instead into time as something poetic and personal. I want the audience to leave with, perhaps, a newfound interest not only in time itself, but in how they embody it and reflect on their own memories and nostalgia.

I think these films also spark great conversations about the materiality and treatment of time. For example, in blue & sentimental by Chloë Gordon. She takes personal home footage and lifts those memories, materializing them into something tangible. She essentially recycles and curates them into a new context that didn’t initially exist. When looking at archives, I think people are reflecting on what it means to be a living archive.

​Ideally, I want people to engage with all these different assortments of time, but I also simply want them to feel inspired and cozy. It’s wonderful to be in a room full of filmmakers, artists, and enthusiasts coming together to hang out, chat, and watch some really interesting films.

​I mean, where else can you do that in our day-to-day lives, other than at a festival specifically curated for these ideas?

​Exactly.

​Ghislan, it’s been wonderful to chat with you. Before I let you go, one last question– how has this experience shifted your own practice or your approach to curation? Is this program an amalgamation of everything you’ve experienced so far?

I think it’s made the curatorial practice very accessible. I was able to lean not only into academic works but also into lived, everyday experiences/ Bringing that forward really reinforced the idea that anyone can be an artist, filmmaker or curator. There isn’t some invisible wall preventing people from stepping into those roles; if you have something that inspires you and invokes that practice, the ability to do it will come organically.

I also think it has affirmed that I am an artist and that I don’t need formal titles to convey that. Looking into the personal lives and stories of these communities has truly shifted my perspective and the outcome of my work.

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​

Based between New York, Berlin and Istanbul, Turan’s curatorial practice and research explore the intersection of state violence, censorship and transnational queer resistance. Currently a Curator-in-Residence for the 2026 Images Festival, Turan is also pursuing a PhD in Art History at the University of Toronto. He previously held the 2023–24 Curatorial Fellowship at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and the General Idea Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Turan’s curatorial works have been featured at institutions such as Whitney ISP (NY), ArteEast & Wallach Gallery (NY), and Slavs & Tatars’ Pickle Bar (Berlin) & Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), to name a few.

The interview was conducted by Thanh Lieu of The Produced.

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The Produced: Alper, thank you so much for being here.

Alper Turan: Thanks for having me!

We are speaking a couple days after the presentation of your two programs, ‘Unstill Image’ and ‘Feral Vision.’ How are you feeling now?

I feel good! These two programs were screened back-to-back. ‘Unstill Image’ was a bit heavy as it discussed, not visually, but in their narratives, political violence. The second program, ‘Feral Vision,’ was mirroring the first program in a very different way. It’s interesting to see how the audience reacted to it.

A couple of days ago, I discussed with Katie Lawson, another curator-in-residence this year, about the theme “Metabolizing Moving Images,” and the ways in which our bodies invite this form into the nervous system. What became interesting after going through your programs was asking myself, is it a laborious process to be involving oneself and body so much in the act of watching and metabolizing it?

For you, when you initially encountered this theme, how did you interpret it?

Thank you so much for this question. When we first heard about the theme, it really resonated with me and my own previous research. My practice is more in contemporary art curation rather than film curation. So, thinking about artists using the camera, editing, and other cinematic apparatuses in a way that mimicked the body’s functions or its budding conditions, was already something I was working on. I used these ideas as my starting point to the curating process.

What I interpreted from metabolizing moving images was not necessarily about our body understanding or digesting them. Rather, I thought about how moving images mimic metabolizing and other bodily processes.

My first program, ‘Unstill Image,’ has a lot to do with vision. We have different films coming from different histories and geographies. On a narrative level, each film was a distinct story. However, on a formal level, they all share the same approach of manipulating, blurring, and intruding vision.

How did you approach threading the opening image and the last image for the program?

The first film, Katarakt by Sofia Dona, is about the eye disease cataract. It’s a disease that clouds your eye’s natural lens and causes foggy vision because it blocks the light from reaching the retina. Formally, Dona mimics cataract in her film visuals. So, when we watch the film, there’s a feeling that our vision is being blocked and deteriorated. On a deeper level, she uses this image to discuss her experiences straddling and living through two different nations, Greece and Turkey. But by the time we reached the last film, we had nothing to see: all that’s left was a black screen and the subtitles. It stopped giving your pleasurable or cathartic feeling or any sort of conscious cleaning.

Usually, we see films and the screen as giving us a separation from the rest of the world. What was interesting in curating this lineup is having films that question, trouble, and try to break that illusion.

For this program, ‘Unstill Image,’ you mentioned that these films exist in direct conversation–perhaps confrontation–with a fixed, sovereign, and colonial gaze that renders our bodies static within a frame. You ask how to sabotage this gaze, but also what it means to submit to it. For me, there’s a sense of fugitivity in these works, fleeing that gaze. I’m curious: as you were developing this program, did you look for ideas, materials or theories to help you navigate and bind these ideas together?

I’m glad you brought up fugitivity. One of the people I looked for was Fred Moten.

I also pulled a lot from my PhD research, which questions the problematic aspect of visibility. For this project, I’m looking into Turkish contemporary art and Turkish LGBT visibility projects. I’m taking a detour here, but I promise I’ll come back to the festival [Laughs].

I’m all ears.

In Turkey, the western understanding of LGBT activism was translated, adopted, and institutionalized in the early 2000s. This signaled a moment of hope. It was also a moment where visibility was taught as something equal to power. The sentiment was that the more visible you are, the bigger your collective community will be. However, this somehow became one of the reasons why there was a surge in cracking down on queer visibility and queer presence in the public space after 2013.​

What interests me is that with visibility, you are also giving a significant amount of information to state power, which can then be weaponized against you. It might sound a bit abstract, but that’s the gist of it.

​So, I also referenced much of Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity. The last one I’ll add (and of course, there are more of them) is my supervisor’s book, John Paul Rico’s The Logic of the Lure.

Some of these ideas also find their way into your second program, ‘Feral Vision,’ which deals a lot with the non-human vision: the bird’s eye. Can you walk me through your process of curating this program?

‘Feral Vision’ was a much different process. I was interested in the acts of looking and seeing in animals as an unsovereign gaze, and how it equips our understanding of the human gaze. In ‘‘Until Image’’ unlikely films from unrelated contexts came together organically, as the films shared structural and narrative connections. For example, the first film ends with a scene of water, and the second begins with the sea. There are many unlikely correspondences between them, like two bodies of water, that you would never expect to be in conversation. ‘Feral Vision’, on the other hand, seems like it’s thematically organized, we have films dealing with animal perspectives. What these films show us is the impossibility of knowing what a creature or an animal sees when they look at us. They’re about the more-than-human perception.

While your curatorial practice is rooted in contemporary art, this residency is one of the few that focuses exclusively on the moving image. How did your approach to this specific project differ from your past work? Do you see it as a distinct shift in your practice, or rather a synthesis of your previous experiences?

Although this is not my first time working with moving images, it’s my first time working within a festival context, particularly an experimental film festival.

It is always challenging to curate a screening because you have to put the films into a narration with a starting point and an ending point. Unlike an exhibition, where there is more freedom of movement for the audience to choose what they look at, here you are putting people in one room and having them to watch in a certain linearity.

For me, those films have to connect through more than just a sequence; it has to feel like an organic experience. I was paying a lot of attention to how those films connect in moments that are more than just thematic. It would be a very boring experience if I were just saying, ‘Okay, now I’m going to show you five films about queer experiences from around the world.’ I like tighter curatorial scaffolding, and I am also trying to bring works together through their functions, motivations, and formal decisions.

Alper, it’s been a joy chatting with you. Thank you for all you do.

Thanks for having me.

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Lawson is a curator, writer, and currently a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate at Western University, where she works with the Centre for Sustainer Curating. Her past curatorial works include the Toronto Biennial of Art and exhibitions at regional galleries, municipalities, and artist-run centres in Canada. In 2023, Lawson was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Fogo Island Arts Young Curator Residency, and later joined the Sustainable Institution Residency at Atelier LUMA in 2024.

For Images Festival this year, she curated three beautiful programs: bodily burden, Refusing (Reproductive) Labour: Ecological Solidarities, and we felt our cells tumble, cluster, and creep.

Written by Thanh Lieu.

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The Produced: Katie, thank you for being here today. This must be a busy time for you as the festival is about to begin!

Katie Lawson: I’m happy to be here! It’s the calm before the storm, so it’s nice to take a moment taking everything in.

This year, the theme for Images Festival is “Metabolizing Moving Images.” You, alongside other curators-in-residence, have curated programs that explore the relationship between the body–the gut, its fibre, and physical sensation–with the film form. These tensions ripple through your first program, “bodily burden,” which you’ve described as films “entangled by breath.” Could you walk me through your curating process and explain how you arrived at this title?

Lawson: Thank you for such a rich question. I’ll start by mentioning a few practicalities, then move to the conceptual and curatorial thinking.

Since most of my work as a curator has involved collaborating with museums, galleries, and public spaces to develop exhibitions, I’m grateful to be working with Images Festival and curating a program that focuses on film as form.

​Throughout the fall of 2025, all the curators reviewed the incredible body of open call submissions that Images received. That meant watching around 6 hours of films per week for a few months. It was such a rich and generative process, but certainly also a lot to take into the body. At the same time, we also brought in our own pre-existing interests, which meant, in some cases, soliciting or inviting films from outside the open call process.

One of the enduring interests in my own work has been the relationship between bodies, particularly in the time of climate change. Mapping it onto the festival’s theme of “Metabolizing Moving Images,” I was immediately drawn to the question of what else the body metabolizes beyond moving image.

I think about components of the world that aren’t visible to us, the different industries in our world, and the burden of those untenable systems on the body.

​The program’s name is a play on the actual scientific term, body burden. It’s a concept describing the total bodily accumulation throughout a lifetime of everything ranging from synthetic chemicals and heavy metals to environmental toxins. In reviewing the films, I was curious about how artists contend with this relationship or the idea of a body burden when, oftentimes, we cannot see these toxins or contaminants. They are part of our world, but they resist visibility or tangibility. In this program, all of the artists and filmmakers take different approaches to make visible or conceivable this kind of relationship that we have with the world.

You’ve grounded ‘bodily burden’ in Sunaura Taylor’s “disabled ecologies,” which links industrial pollution to both environmental and human disablement. This program powerfully reminds me of a film I recently watched, Vibrations from Gaza. It is a short film by Rehab Nazzal about deaf Palestinian children who live under Israeli occupation and experience drone surveillance and bombardments. As you were talking through the program, I found myself thinking about many new ideas, so thank you for such an apt and evocative curation.

​Thank you for your recommendation! I’m very eager to see Vibrations from Gaza. Something that came up in a very big way in ‘bodily burden,’ which resonates with Vibrations from Gaza, is the military-industrial complex.

I think it is often a lesser-recognized industry and perpetrator of both human and more-than-human violence. It’s a force that produces disablement in human bodies and environments. I want to recognize this because, as we were developing the programs last year, I was thinking deeply about the military complex becoming an increasingly more urgent subject across different geographies.

As it often goes, when you program a festival or an exhibition, you don’t always know what the state of the world will be once the festival comes around, what might be newly resonant or felt deeply. So, it’s not lost on me that the festival is now coinciding with what’s happening in Iran. Even though it doesn’t come up in these particular films, they allow us to see what’s happening in Iran through a different lens. The bombing of oil infrastructure. The immense loss of human life.

I think about the black rain that happened in March when the bombing occurred: a chemical cocktail unleashed into the air and into the ground, and the effects that will ripple across generations. So, especially with the film that you brought up, I recognize this element as a crucial part in ‘bodily burden’ as well.

Certainly. And the themes of nature, ecology, labour and capitalism continue pulsating in your next program, which is called ‘Refusing (Productive) Labour: Ecological Solidarities.’

Although there is some overlap with ‘bodily burden,’ there’s a slightly different tone and themes present in this program. We have three films by artists Stéphanie Lagarde, Oona Taper and Anouk Verviers. These artists, in their respective works, think about the extractive relationships with the land and the conditions of capitalism, particularly thinking about different forms of labour in a capitalist system as it pertains to reproductive health.

Stéphanie Lagarde, in Extra Life (And Decay), taps into questions around the nuclear family, the unit of labour under capitalism, and the stripping of support for anyone who does care work. Specifically, it urges us to think about where we place value in the world.

Oona Taper’s The Rabbit Always Dies, by contrast, thinks about a lesser-known history of the use of African frogs or toads as mainstream pregnancy tests between the 1930s and 1960s. Because it offered a “faster” and “cheaper” method for pregnancy testing, it became a priority for capital accumulation. Certainly, it comes with this hidden cost. There was a massive amount of African clawed frogs shipped globally. Once their usefulness had ended, they were released into the wild, becoming invasive species that led to the extinction of more than 200 amphibian species. With this film, I was thinking about the value systems that we don’t necessarily confront on a day-to-day basis but certainly structure and shape our lives and ecosystems in integral ways.

The final film, Anouk Verviers’ The world was always full of us, is grounded in conversations about misdiagnosis and treatment of endometriosis, and solidarity within communities of folks who also experience these conditions. It also dives into the horrors of being treated within the medical-industrial complex.

This is deeply profound, especially since these films bring to the surface the interconnected systems that, as you mentioned, typically subsume to the background of our lives. How did you develop the title, ‘Refusing (Productive) Labour: Ecological Solidarities’?

That’s a good question. While the first part of the title captures the aspects of refusal and labour, the second part points to the fact that all of the films present interesting forms of relationship building with the more-than-human. Whether it’s the frogs used in pregnancy tests, a pile of gravel, or errant cells of endometriosis colonizing the body, in one way or another, everything is interconnected. Simultaneously, these films also reveal ways in which many of these organisms hold potential for thinking otherwise, thinking about life that doesn’t fall within the order and logic of capitalism.

I want to return to something you mentioned earlier. Your curation process is, in a way, responsive; it wrestles with our current political landscape. This is a more personal question, if that’s okay. How do you manage that emotionally as a curator, perhaps not necessarily distancing yourself, but maybe absorbing them in a way that is generative for your craft?

What a question. Hm, do I cope? Maybe this is a different way of asking [Laughs].

I started working as a curator because seeing the world through the eyes of artists allows me to process and take in the world differently. Similarly to what we discussed, the work that artists do allow us to imagine an otherwise distant from what exists in reality. So, I really lean on art to help me process the world.

I straddle this line between working in the art world and academia, which draws on different skills that ask us to make sense of the world in very different ways. They’re different containers. For me, working with Images Festival has been a real joy and way of coping.

I’ve also been thinking throughout my career about how best to provide a space for difficult conversations in a way that feels generative and supportive. Not all the films we discussed today are very statistics forward or overwhelmed with the sheer immensity of these issues; instead, they are rooted in personal perspectives. Central to their narratives is the craft of storytelling which, for me, allows us to connect with an audience from a place of curiosity rather than fear. These artists’ works offer so many points of access: open invitations to join the conversation from a “good place” without feeling shut down or burdened by the urgency of the subject matter. There is also a great deal of playfulness and absurdity throughout the programs, which I find essential for keeping the dialogue open and accessible.

That is such a beautiful way of putting it, which leads me to the last program, ‘we felt our cells tumble, cluster, and creep.’ This title takes a much more personal stance than the first two––a more gentle voice. I would love to hear your process on that.

I can’t take credit for the beautiful title of this program; it was authored by the artist Anouk Vervier as the title for her new performance, which happens the day following the film program for Refusing (Reproductive) Labour: Ecological Solidarities. The screening includes her most recent film, The world was always full of us, which is the second chapter in a film trilogy that works with the genre of science fiction to touch on experiences of endometriosis and chronic pain.

​In the film, there’s a strong association between endometriosis and scree, which is an accumulation of loose, small rock fragments, pebbles, and debris found on mountain slopes or at the base of cliffs, formed by weathering. So, the title of the performance evokes the movement of errant endometrial cells in the body, tumbling, clustering, creeping like scree, and it is an extension of or response to the film work. Anouk has some new materials that she will be experimenting with through the performance, including some old medical slides with endometrial cells purchased secondhand. When she shines light through them, they create beautiful visuals that are strikingly similar to cartographic maps or topographies.

The performance takes place within an installation of the artist’s sculptures and features a series of actions. The artist alternates between reading a new text, creating projections with medical slides, and crushing wintergreen candies beneath her feet--to name a few elements.