Beatrice Gibson: Plural Dreams of Social Life
Mercer Union, Toronto
April 13–June 1, 2019
Halfway through Beatrice Gibson’s (2019)—one of two films by the London, UK-based filmmaker installed at Mercer Union this spring—a woman reads a letter to her yet-to-be-born daughter: “You will be a girl, but not like me. You will be Black, but not like me.… You will create something else, and that reassures me.” This woman, Diocouda Diaoune, was one of two members of Gibson’s extended network of friends and artists to become pregnant as they worked together on Gibson’s film and its earlier sister work, (2018). Diaoune’s and artist Basma Alsharif’s, and both speak to the uncanny forms of doubling and distancing that swirl around experiences of pregnancy. In Alsharif’s words, “this thing that would be made of me but completely alien.”
