For the dv_vd series, Vidéographe and Dazibao have invited curators Farah Atoui and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy to present a program of works. 

PROGRAM (76 min)

• I Would Like to Visit, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, 2017, 4 min 25 s
• Canada Park, Razan AlSalah, 2020,  8 min 4 s
• untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends…, Jayce Salloum, 2000, 11 min 34 s
• The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, Adam Khalil, 2017, 9 min 45 s
• Something from there, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, 2020, 7 min
• Yaffa, Nada El-Omari, 2019,  7 min
• Wild Rice Harvest Kenora, Alanis Obomsawin, 1979, 1 min
• Farming, Alanis Obomsawin, 1975, 1 min
• Healing Moments, Rehab Nazzal, 2023, 8 min 28 s
• Xusum, Alanis Obomsawin, 1975, 4 min
• Reclamation, TJ Cuthand, 2018, 13 min

CURATORIAL STATEMENT 

“The land is essential to understanding the intent that drives Israel’s genocide. We must step out of our western understanding of land and place and property. Because for the Palestinians, as for all Indigenous Peoples, the land is not the place where they live; the land is who they are. This creates an inherent conflict between Israel who seeks to acquire the land and the Palestinians for whom the land is integral to their existence. This is what orients the settler-colonial state toward the need to eliminate the Indigenous. This is why the displacement, the dispossession, the cultural destruction, the devastation of food sovereignty —which are of course, war crimes and crimes against humanity on their own accord—are also to be seen as intended to sever the cultural belonging and connection of the Palestinians to the land.”

                                                               Francesca Albanese, November 20, 2024, School of Oriental and

African Studies, University of London

Land Back brings together a powerful collection of voices of Palestinian and Indigenous artists who, through their experimental film and video works, confront the violence of colonial dispossession, displacement and cultural erasure, while asserting claims for the return of and to ancestral lands, and for the restoration of sovereignty. LAND BACK is not a metaphor. It is a demand for the right of return and right to self-determination for Palestinians through the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid, from the river to the sea; a demand that is intrinsically tied to the literal restoration of land ownership, stewardship, and jurisdiction to the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. By using this framework, and juxtaposing the layered and interconnected histories of settler colonialism and resistance in Palestine and Turtle Island, Land Back highlights the shared land-based struggles of Palestinians and Indigenous Peoples, as it also recognizes their distinct cultural and historical contexts.

The works featured in this program explore the profound connections between land, identity, and historic presence, emphasizing that a material claim to the land is fundamental to anti-colonial struggles. Through varied aesthetic approaches— experimenting with text, digital images, archival material, and photographs, and mobilizing the power of poetry and poetic imagery—these artistic interventions provide counter-narratives that expose the colonial fictions and myths underpinning settler-colonial projects. Grounded in lived and embodied experiences and drawing on oral histories of displacement and exile, these films stand as testimonies that reveal the violence of colonial projects and borders, which conflate the Map with the Land, and attempt to sever the deeply rooted personal, cultural and spiritual practices of its inhabitants.

Muhammad Nour ElKhairy’s minimalistic text-based video I Would Like to Visit (2017) draws from his lived experience to expose the oppressive nature of colonial border control regimes, that not only restrict the mobility of Palestinians but also render the prospect of visiting or returning to their homeland nearly impossible. Simultaneously, ElKhairy critically examines the fraught nature of Palestinian displacement to Canada, where the search for refuge and the right to mobility positions him as a settler on Indigenous land. 

Razan Al Salah’s experimental poem Canada Park (2020) also examines the impact of settler-colonialism on Palestinian identity and mobility. Digitally trespassing colonial borders via Google Street View, she enacts an impossible return to Palestine where her spectral presence hovers over Ayalon-Canada Park. This park, built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli occupation in 1967 and funded in part by contributions from the Jewish National Fund Canada, underscores the connections between settler-colonial projects in Palestine and Turtle Island. By situating their narratives within the Canadian context, both ElKhairy and AlSalah’s works open a space for a critical reflection on solidarity and shared resistance against colonial projects and structures.

Jayce Salloum’s untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends… (2000) examines the history of colonial destruction and erasure through the perspective of a Palestinian home reduced to rubble by Israeli occupation forces in 1967. This story is poetically narrated through the voice of the homeowner, who was displaced from Palestine to a refugee camp in Lebanon. In Salloum’s experimental video, abstract imagery—blooming orchids, drifting clouds, flowing water— is superimposed on raw footage of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres to reveal the harrowing reality of displacement to Lebanon. This juxtaposition, which creates a deeply unsettling engagement with violence and its representation, offers an alternative visual language to process the images of genocide and atrocities unfolding in Palestine and Lebanon today. 

The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2017) by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys also creates an unsettling viewing experience. This video employs an experimental storytelling approach to bring to light the central role played by archaeological practices and museum institutions in erasing Indigenous histories and manufacturing settler-colonial narratives of discovery and ownership. Focusing on the contested case of the Kennewick Man—a 9,000-year-old skeletal remains found in the soil of the Columbia Basin—the filmmakers examine how colonial power weaponizes scientific disciplines to refute Indigenous claims to ancestry and land. Here, the soil embodies a profound sense of belonging, anchoring Indigenous communities to a place that remains central to their identity and history, deeply rooted in the land itself. 

In Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s Something from there (2020), soil becomes a medium for telling an intimate story of displacement from Palestine to Canada. Weaved from interviews with her parents and family photographs, the film explores the poignant practice of gifting soil from Palestine to those living in exile—a gesture that serves as both a symbolic and material connection to the land they were forced to leave behind and are often unable to return to. The act of gifting soil transcends its symbolism and materiality, becoming a powerful act of resistance that affirms Palestinians’ enduring connection and rights to their homeland, even across generations of displacement. As Hamadeh’s mother Rehab Nazzal poignantly states in Something from there, “soil is the source of life; it is life; it signifies life.” 

Echoing Hamadeh’s work, Nada El-Omari’s experimental film Yaffa (2019) intricately layers and superimposes diverse footage to create a textured portrayal of an intergenerational journey of displacement and the enduring memory of a homeland. Through poetic narration framed as a letter to her grandfather—displaced from Yaffa to Canada—El-Omari reflects on his “whispered stories of a bleeding sea,” which profoundly shaped her identity, memory, and deep connection to the land and sea he was severed from. 

Alanis Obomsawin’s three short vignettes—Wild Rice Harvest Kenora (1979), Farming (1975), Xusum (1975)—highlight the deep connection of the Líl̓wat Nation and the Anishinaabe people to their land as a vital source of sustenance, culture, and community. These films center on communal practices of harvesting, farming, and food preparation, portraying them as essential to Indigenous identity. They also underscore the critical importance of food sovereignty, not only as a means of sustenance but as a practical and political necessity tied to broader struggles for land, cultural survival, and self-determination. 

Rehab Nazzal’s Healing Moments (2023) offers a meditative exploration of the West Bank’s landscapes through sensorially immersive imagery that emphasizes the spiritual connection Palestinians maintain with their land, and its capacity to nurture steadfastness and healing despite its violent segmentation by Israeli checkpoints and the apartheid Wall. Together, these two works underscore the restorative bonds between Indigenous peoples and their land, while highlighting enduring struggles for sovereignty and belonging.

TJ Cuthand’s Reclamation (2018) serves as a forward-looking conclusion to the program, as it re-orients the narrative from the struggles of the past and the present to the potential of what lies ahead. Reclamation envisions a post-dystopian future in Canada where privileged white settlers have abandoned Earth for Mars, leaving behind a planet devastated by colonialism and capitalism. In their absence, Indigenous peoples reclaim the land, working to restore its vitality and heal the deep scars inflicted by settler-colonial systems. Cuthand’s speculative narrative emphasizes the enduring connection to the land as a source of resilience and renewal, while imagining futures shaped by decolonization and environmental restoration.

Land Back illuminates Indigenous Peoples’ ongoing struggles for sovereignty, from Palestine to Turtle Island, and emphasizes the profound and enduring connections that bind them to their homelands across generations and geographies. This screening program is an opportunity to reflect on the interconnection of anti-colonial struggles and the urgency of transnational solidarity projects in the face of the destructive effects and violent legacies of colonization. It is also an invitation to envision a more hopeful and just future where land is no longer an exploitable resource or property, but a living entity that culturally and materially sustains Indigenous identity and existence, and that constitutes a repository—of his/stories, knowledge, communal practices and cultural traditions—carrying the legacy of ancestors and ensuring survival. 

– Farah Atoui and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy

SYNOPSIS 

I Would Like to Visit, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy,  2017, 4 min 25 s

An experimental short and installation work that combines text and film to explore the simple desire to travel, through the cultural and political realities of being Palestinian. Soundtracked with the anxiety of disposition, the work opts to show a close-up of text being typed and edited on word-processing software, the work complicates a simple desire to travel by adding to it the social, cultural and political realities of being a Palestinian on Indigenous land in Turtle Island. 

Canada Park, Razan AlSalah, 2020,  8 min 4 s

I walk on snow to fall onto the desert. I find myself on unceded Indigenous territory in so-called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli occupation in 1967. 

Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Street View and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with Emmaus, a village cited in the bible. Imwas is erased and Emmaus marked a religious touristic site in the park, a self-fulfilled scriptural and algorithmic prophecy.

The park is located between what is commonly known as No Man’s Land and Jerusalem. The film explores this absurd space of suspension to create a counter mythology of this place against the religious, geopolitical and capitalist forces that actuated their imaginings on Palestine, people and land by reinserting the few images documenting the March of Return to Latroun that took place on June 16, 2007. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.

I wake up again, feet on the ground in so called Canada; another park, Iroquois Mohawk territory. I walk on snow to fall unto the desert.

untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends…, Jayce Salloum, 2000, 11 min 34 s

A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and plants growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Cloud footage, Hubble space imagery, the visible body crosscuts, and abstract shots of slow motion water, add to this reflection of the past, its present context and genocidal trajectory. With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, and the collection of audio accompanying the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape provides an elegiac response to the ongoing Palestinian dispossession.

The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, Adam Khalil,

2017, 9 min 45 s

An urgent reflection on Indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the “Kennewick Man,” a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

 Something from there, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, 2020, 7 min

Something from there is a short film on the substance of our original lands. How does connection to land change after uprooting and in diaspora? How does matter embody memories and defy official histories? These are some of the open-ended questions asked in this reflection on the complicated implications of wanting a piece of land after displacement. Weaving between the voices of the artist’s parents, one a refugee and the other not, the film is personal, yet evokes a shared Palestinian experience. A fragmented story of the artist’s father’s exile from Palestine in 1948 is the guiding narrative. As he explains, he has not returned since—but for a single day in the sixties. Her mother, on the other hand, grew up in and has lived in Palestine for much of her life (her contribution to the film was recorded over Zoom while she sat on a patio in her hometown). Although her story is not the focus, it becomes clear that she is able to return and collect the “something from there” referred to. The “something” is never named, though it is the center of the narrative. Is it the soil? A piece of land? The remains of our ancestors? The distinction between land and body is not made, and rather Something from there focuses on the power of memory and material to revive a denied homeland and counter the settler colonial impetus to erase any assertion of Indigenous life. 

Yaffa, Nada El-Omari, 2019,  7 min

Yaffa is a short experimental film in which space and time become meshed together to form the fragments we create our stories from. In those pieces of images, memories arise and stories retell themselves. It is through our mutual time, words, explorations and spaces that I realized my grandfather gifted me a home.

Wild Rice Harvest Kenora, Alanis Obomsawin, 1979,  1 min

Wild rice is an important source of food and revenue for many Anishinaabe people, who sometimes travel hundreds of kilometres to harvest the grain in the region around Kenora, Ontario. Directed by Alanis Obomsawin as part of the Canada Vignettes series.

Farming, Alanis Obomsawin, 1975, 1 min

The farming practices of residents of the Líl̓wat Nation near Mount Currie, B.C., are presented in a series of snapshots that illustrate the fertility of their territory and the people’s deep connection to their land. This short is part of the L’il’wata series. In the early 1970s, at the outset of her documentary career, Alanis Obomsawin visited the Líl̓wat Nation, an Interior Salish First Nation in British Columbia, and created a series of shorts that provide personal narratives about Líl̓wat culture, histories and knowledge.

Healing Moments, Rehab Nazzal, 2023, 8 min 28 s

This video is part of the multimedia installation Driving in Palestine which combines photography, video, printed matter, and sound to offer glimpses of Israel’s structures of segregation, confinement, surveillance and restriction to freedom of movement that proliferate the occupied West Bank. Captured from moving vehicles on Palestinian roads spanning 2010 to 2020, a decade of images compels viewers to question the link between suppression and debilitation of Indigenous people and the attempts to expropriate and destroy their land. 

Xusum, Alanis Obomsawin, 1975, 4 min

Accompanied by a song in the Lil̓wat7úl language, we follow a woman as she makes gwùshum, a Stl’atl’imx (Líl̓wat) dessert and a very special treat. From the harvesting of the xúsum (soapberries or salmonberries) to the construction of the corn-husk whisk, a dish is created that is equal measures mouthwatering and awe-inspiring. 

This short is part of the L’il’wata series. In the early 1970s, at the outset of her documentary career, Alanis Obomsawin visited the Stl’atl’imx (Líl̓wat) Nation, an Interior Salish First Nation in British Columbia, and created a series of shorts that provide personal narratives about their culture, histories and knowledge.

Reclamation, TJ Cuthand, 2018, 13 min

Reclamation is a documentary-style imagining of a post-dystopic future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the after-effects of the large scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. When Indigenous people are left behind after a massive exodus by primarily privileged White settlers who have moved to Mars, the original inhabitants of this land cope by trying to restore and rehabilitate the beautiful country they feel they belong to. Complicated by the need to look after southern climate refugees, this post-dystopic society struggles to reinvent itself as a more healthy community, with opportunities for healing from shared trauma, and using traditional Indigenous scientific knowledge to reclaim Canada environmentally.

Indigenous people demonstrate the jobs they are doing to heal Canada, the Earth, and themselves, like clean water projects, gathering litter, disposing safely of hazardous wastes, planting trees, conducting healing circles and ceremonies, playing together, and having discussions about what it feels like to be left behind on what was seen by White settlers as a dying, disposable, planet.

CURATORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Farah Atoui is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Moving Image Studies, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. She is a cultural organizer and a media scholar specializing in contemporary film, video, and visual culture with a focus on moving-image practices from the Arab world. Atoui’s work explores artistic interventions produced under conditions of struggle and duress—war, occupation, colonization, crisis, displacement– as both tools and spaces for resistance, as well as sites for critical knowledge production that re-energize solidarity and decolonial imaginaries. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University, where her doctoral research examined post-2011 experimental Syrian documentaries as countervisualizations to the representational regime of the refugee “crisis.” She is an independent curator and film programmer, and a member of the Regards Palestiniens and Regards Syriens screening collectives.

Muhammad Nour Elkhairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan, currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). ElKhairy holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University.  His experimental fiction and non-fiction video works are particularly concerned with the legacies of colonial, political and economic power. Intrinsic to his work is the desire to highlight the screen not only as an ideological apparatus but also as a surface onto which the performed self exists between the interiority of the personal and the exteriority of the sociopolitical. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries including Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Kaunas International Film Festival, Toronto Palestine Film Festival and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Adam Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Khalil’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Lincoln Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including but not limited to: Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Sundance Institute Indigenous Program, UnionDocs Collaborative Fellowship, and Gates Millennium Scholars Program. Khalil received his BA from Bard College.

Alanis Obomsawin: One of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—50 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “My main interest all my life has been education,” says Obomsawin, “because that’s where you develop yourself, where you learn to hate, or to love.”

Jackson Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist belonging to Tlingit territory, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and was the recipient of a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront desires for indigeneity, settler-colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth and agency. His individual and collaborative works have appeared at the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Artists Space, Burke Museum, e-flux, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Images Festival, MIT, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Park Avenue Armory, Sundance Film Festival, UnionDocs, Toronto Biennial of Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.

Jayce Salloum tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, his projects being rooted in an intimate engagement with place. A grandson of Syrian or Lebanese immigrants, he was born and raised on others’ land, the Sylix (Okanagan) territory. After years of living elsewheres he planted himself on the unceded stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səíl̓wətaʔł. Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more. In/out of this context not that it really matters, Salloum has lectured, published and exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible and most improbable, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Canada, The Havana Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montréal. Her practice and research interests centre on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement, and the stories of belonging and identity which she explores through a poetic, hybrid lens. Focusing on process and fragments in text, sound, and image, Nada explores new ways to self-narrate, and speak hybridity and self. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and an MFA in Film from York University. 

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based on Algonquin Anishinaabe land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework and using memory and story to engage intimately with broad concepts. Her practice is informed by the knowledge emerging from grassroots movements, both in occupied Palestine and across Turtle Island. Nazzal Hamadeh holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and is based between occupied Ramallah and Ottawa.

Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. She often works with sound-images to infiltrate borders that have severed us from the land. Her films are both ghostly trespasses, and seeping ruptures, of the colonial image, that functions as a border, as a wall. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects and sounds… and the unknown. These relations become different points of entry and exit into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.

Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal and Bethlehem, Palestine. Her work deals with the effects of settler-colonial violence on the bodies and minds of colonized peoples, on the land and on other non-human life. Nazzal’s video, photography and sound works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. Nazzal is currently an assistant professor at Dar Al-Kalima University in Bethlehem and has taught at Simon Fraser University, Western University and Ottawa School of Art. She is a recipient of multiple awards in Canada and internationally.

Theo Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 he has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festiva, Festival MixBrasil de Cultura da Diversidade , imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbour Film Festival, Images Festival, Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Outfest, and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen . His work has also been exhibited at galleries including the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, The National Gallery of Canada, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and The Walker Art Center. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and his Masters of Arts in Media Production at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2015. He has made commissioned works for Urban Shaman and Videopool in Winnipeg, Cinema Politica in Montréal, VIMAF in Vancouver, and Bawaadan Collective in Canada. In 2020 he completed working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on his experience learning and dealing with his bipolar disorder. In 2023 he completed his second video game, Carmilla the Lonely. He has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 he won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. He is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. He has made 32 videos and films and counting. Currently he has a feature film in development. He is a trans man who uses He/Him pronouns. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.

Zack Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work often explores an indigenous worldview and undermines traditional forms of historical authority through the excavation of alternative histories and the use of innovative documentary forms. He recently completed a B.A. at Bard College in the Film and Electronic Arts Department, and is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar.