Image War on Reality Writing Workshop + Screening

Screening:
When: 3 November 2025 @ 6 pm
Where: The Screening Room, 120 Princess St

Workshop:
When: 4 November 2025, 12:00–2:00 pm
Where: Rideau Building, 207 Stuart St, Studio A

Agnes is pleased to host a writing workshop facilitated by guest curator and Queen’s University grad alum Yaniya Lee. This workshop is aimed at students from any discipline who would like to sharpen their writing skills or explore new approaches to critical and creative writing inspired by moving image work. The prompt: how do moving images shift our assumptions about the meaning behind what we see?

The workshop will use a curated film screening as the starting point for creative writing exercises.

Here, formal experimentation dissembles and reshapes the meaning of images. Placed side by side, films show us the ways in which representation can be at odds with reality. Haunted images. Found images. Images that hold back or show too much.

The screening will take place the day before the workshop and is exclusively for registered participants.

Registration is required and includes admission to both the screening and workshop.

Please bring a pen or pencil, paper or a notebook to the writing component.

Yaniya Lee’s graduate research in the Gender Studies Department at Queen’s University experimented with Black Studies approaches to Art History. She is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024) and Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project. Lee has taught and written about art for universities, museums, and institutions across North America and Europe, including Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, de Appel Amsterdam, Dutch Art Institute, Momus, Toronto Biennial of Art, Queen’s University, and University of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Racar: Canadian Art Review, Public Journal, Asia Art Archive, C Magazine, Flash Art, Justsmile, and Montez Press.

Young woman with dark hair and a brown shirt stares solemnly at the camera

Yaniya Lee. Photo by Yuula Benivolski

Films

Associations, John Smith, 1975, 7min
Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by the American psycholinguist Herbert H Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together/against each other to destroy/create meaning.

Cavity, Ariella Tai, 2019, 6min
Cavity is a short film meditating on revenge, power and alternate realities. Using the unanswered rage of Olivia Pope and her mother, Maya Lewis, as visual and sonic focal points, different narratives and their possibilities coalesce as a deadly siren song.

Palcorecore, Dana Dawud, 2023, 6min
Dana Dawud’s Palcorecore is a hypnotic fusion of dance, archival footage, and internet-circulated videos that collapse past and present into a visceral portrait of Palestinian life.

Wind (Szél), Marcell Iványi, 1996, 7min
Taking inspiration from The Three Women, a 1951 photo by Lucien Hervé, Wind asks what might lie outside the frame. This 360 degrees exploration of a scene imagined occurs in the remote countryside, where three women witness an unsettling event.

How Not To Be Seen, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1970, 4min
The sketch purports to be a British government public information film in which a disembodied narrator, voiced by John Cleese, instructs viewers on “how not to be seen.”

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, Terence Dixon, 1970, 28min
A meeting with James Baldwin doesn’t go quite according to plan for a group of pretentious white filmmakers in this extremely rare short film set in Paris. It’s an instructive snapshot of Baldwin’s intellectual worldview, full of friction and ideas.