SIGHTINGS 2022-2024
SEE FEVER
Launched in 2012 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection, the SIGHTINGS satellite exhibition program was conceived as an experimental platform to critically reflect upon the possibilities and limitations of the modernist “white cube.” As part of this program, artists and curators are invited to develop projects for a cubic display unit located in a public space at the university, with the aim of generating new strategies for art dissemination.
This fall, the Gallery launches a multi-year cycle focusing on the theme SEE FEVER. The expression refers to a fervent desire to “see everything,” the lure of strategies that aim to see “more” or “further,” and to contexts that widen our field of vision or destabilize our perceptual mechanisms. Reflecting this theme, the SIGHTINGS cube is envisaged as a raised observation platform whose four transparent walls provide a 360-degree view. Projects will examine the viewing subject’s perceptual and psychic experience when presented with a wide-angle perspective, the search for the panoramic view and the horizon, and the optical apparatuses and technologies that permit the augmentation, enhancement, and disorientation of vision’s spatial logic.
SIGHTINGS is located on the ground floor of the Hall Building: 1455, blvd. De Maisonneuve West and is accessible weekdays and weekends from 7 am to 11 pm. The program is developed by Julia Eilers Smith.
Bodies in Motion
Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and Montreal. 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. She was 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 the recipient of several awards, including the Social Justice Award from Toronto Metropolitan University and the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Visual Arts Award in Photography from the University of Ottawa.
Nazzal is the current Horizon postdoctoral fellow of the Post Image Cluster, which is part of Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology.
Bodies in Motion explores the act of slinging stones, drawing on its origins in mythology, historical accounts, and contemporary movements of defiance. The installation features vinyl prints based on photographs I took in Bethlehem in 2015 and 2016, when a Palestinian uprising erupted across the country. I regularly observed Palestinian youth slinging stones at Israel’s occupation forces during their invasions of the city. These forces used multiple types of weapons to suppress protests demanding an end to the military occupation and colonization.
The work is part of a larger series of seven images that break down the movement of a body slinging stones: first, rotating the sling sideways and upwards; then, twisting, swinging, and extending the body; and finally, slinging, rotating, and balancing the body afterward.[1] The protesters seen in the
photographs have been outlined and rendered as black silhouettes to emphasize their anonymity, thereby amplify the act of slinging, its symbolism, and potential effects.
In the SIGHTINGS cube, four of these images are displayed on the transparent walls, elucidating a motion sequence that is at the essence of popular struggles. The silhouettes accentuate the performative aspect of the body protesting, while also highlighting the endurance that underlies frontline movements.
By transcending its source of inspiration—the photographs of Palestinians protesting Israel’s settler colonial occupation—the installation resonates with movements of popular resistance across the globe against colonization, systemic racism, exploitation, environmental destruction, social inequality, and all forms of discrimination. The project probes the inherent resilience of human bodies to power disparities, while the sling and stone symbolize defiance and the collective strength of bodies resisting. This symbolism echoes the ancient story of David and Goliath, where a boy faces a giant warrior with his sling.
Stone-throwing was and continues to be employed in contemporary liberation, social and environmental movements around the world, such as the Palestinian Intifadas (uprisings)—including the First “stones” Intifada (1987–1993). In these contexts, the sling and stone become powerful symbols and tools of resistance to confront repressive power. The installation in the cube challenges the perception of oppressed bodies as passive constructs. Instead, the body is framed as an active agent of change which possesses the capacity to contest the regimes and structures that subjugate it.
Central to this series of images is my interest and research in embodied experience, choreography, movement, and the physicality of resistance. When contemplating them, viewers encounter first-hand how Palestinian bodies are sites of settler colonial oppression and military occupation besides being sites of defiance.
The act of stone throwing is a choreographed movement that extends beyond the individual to the collective, as protesters become a united, powerful, and coordinated force. In occupied territories, where freedom of movement is restricted and surveillance apparatuses proliferate, even ordinary acts of mobility can take on political significance. Checkpoints, curfews, watchtowers, and other forms of spatial control make everyday tasks difficult and potentially dangerous, constituting constant reminders of the unequal power dynamic. This work seeks to shed light on the ways in which the body navigates these challenges and finds creative strategies to assert its agency.
By drawing on historical and mythological antecedents, Bodies in Motion connects the struggle of the Palestinians for freedom, self-determination, and refugees’ right of return since the 1948 Nakba to a broader narrative of defiance and determination that spans centuries and cultures.
[1] Bodies in Motion was part of the multimedia installation Choreographies of Resistance, exhibited at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery and AXENÉO7 Gallery (2018).
Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and Montreal. 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. She was 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 the recipient of several awards, including the Social Justice Award from Toronto Metropolitan University and the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Visual Arts Award in Photography from the University of Ottawa.
Nazzal is the current Horizon postdoctoral fellow of the Post Image Cluster, which is part of Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology.
The artist wishes to thank Julia Eilers Smith, Michèle Thériault, Deanna Bowen, Hannah Claus, the Post Image Cluster at Milieux Institute, Concordia University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).