A Smile Split by the Stars is a collaborative narration of nourbeSe philip’s poem, Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones. Working within, across and beyond colonial lexicons, the installation reads philip’s poem through, and as, different audio-visual-textual moments of revolutionary intent, wherein Black girlhood and Black femininity are, a priori, re-coding the aesthetic promises of modernity.

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Anchored to nourbeSe philip’s gorgeous poem, we each offered different interpretations and readings of this work, in essay form, in conversation, through archival work, bookmaking, across photographic and textual narratives, in sounds, circuits and shared stories. We are: nourbeSe philip, Katherine McKittrick, Nasrin Himada, Juliane Okot Bitek, Trish Salah, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Chloé Savoie-Bernard, Yaniya Lee, Sameen Mahboubi, Aaliyah Strachan, Muna Dahir, Cristian Ordóñez, Roya DelSol.

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Exhibition and programs co-produced with  Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University and the The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness Working Group. Co-presented with the Ban Righ Centre, Ontario Arts Council and the  Canada Council for the Arts.