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.

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.

Exhibition and Programs in partnership and co-produced with Agnes Etherington Art Centre and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Co-presented with Images Festival, the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University and the The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness Working Group, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and the  Canada Council for the Arts.

Header image credit: m. nourbeSe philip, excerpt from Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones, design by Cristian Ordóñez, 2024