Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition Dream Deep Enough to Remember: The Films of Tamika Galanis from October 15-December 19, 2026 at our architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade.

Dream Deep Enough to Remember is a survey of moving image works by filmmaker and multimedia artist Tamika Galanis. Galanis produces counter-archives through her art, mending the holes in the historical record through re-enactment, reclamation, and speculative narrative grounded in research, allowing us to encounter  stories and experiences that are systematically erased.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Galanis will be present for two free indoor events: a filmmaking workshop using archival materials, on Wednesday, October 14 from 4:30-6 p.m. in the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center and an indoor screening and Q&A of the works in Dream Deep Enough to Remember featuring additional work, including By the Skin of Her Teeth, Galanis’ latest work, currently in-progress, shot in Syracuse, New York on Thursday, October 15 from 6-7:30 p.m. in Watson Theater at Light Work.

About the Work

Catching Shadow 
2021
Duration: 6:02

Catching Shadow is the story of an Obeah woman who petitions a Silk Cotton tree for a spirit bound there and when she makes it to the water, she realizes that she has, inadvertently, freed more than intended. The spirits in the film, aptly represented by photographs, which are essentially light and shadow, point to another historical reference to “shadow” as self-representation in the famous Sojourner Truth inscription on her cartes de visite, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” The film is based on an actual practice outlined in Martha Beckwith’s book, Black Roadways, which documents inquiry into Jamaican folkways from 1919-1924.

When the Lionfish Came
2015
Duration: 6:02

A six-minute experimental, short film that superimposes the natural world with the cultural environment. This film uses metaphor to address both the effects of capitalism and climate change in the Caribbean—particularly The Bahamas. The lionfish, predatory-outsider, non-native species in the Atlantic, has since the early 90s, wrought havoc on reef systems in the Atlantic Ocean. This film is an illustration of disappearing Bahamian culture (through Junkanoo and reef imagery), the palpability of the absence of real climate change initiatives, and the continued pursuit of capitalistic endeavors (tourism) despite cultural decline. Using both shot and found footage and rendered in black and white to counter ideas of the tropical ideal, this film posits that perhaps the lionfish came to provide clear illustration of the region’s fate without intervention.

Returning the Gaze 
2018
Duration: 5:04

Created in response to a failed Bahamian constitutional referendum in 2016, Returning the Gaze  juxtaposes all the West Indian films featuring women from the Thomas Edison Paper Film Collection at the Library of Congress with contemporary footage—shot in the Bahamas—as a response to the archival films. The referendum sought (among other things)  to extend women equal rights in passing along citizenship to their spouses and children. The contemporary characters represent what that footage would like if the characters had a higher degree of agency. The original films, coupled with their written descriptions in the film catalog, demonstrate power—both apparent and perceived. 

About the Artist

Tamika Galanis is a Bahamian-American documentarian and multimedia visual artist whose work considers the relationship between historical documentary accounts and the extractive power relations they often obscure. Her work seeks to produce counter-archives that promote archival futurity and speculative interventions that allow us to encounter a past that has been systematically effaced.

Galanis’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, The Bahamas International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, L.A. Film Forum, MOCA Los Angeles, Hong Gah Museum in Taipei, and the inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Festival.

Galanis earned her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. She is a former Jon B. Lovelace Fellow for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress; the inaugural Post-MFA Fellow of Documentary Arts at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and, former Fellow of Film and Media Studies at Emory University.

Galanis currently splits her time between The Bahamas and Upstate New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University.

Artist’s website: tamikagalanis.com

Sponsors

Light Work programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. By the Skin of Her Teeth received additional support through a 2026 NYSCA Support for Artists grant.

Light Work programs are made possible through through a Tier Two grant from the County of Onondaga, with the support of County Executive Ryan McMahon and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts