Vancouver
Dec 6, 6:30pm PST, 9:30pm EST
Vines Art Festival is based on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl ̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam) Nations. These are lands that, like Palestine, have been deeply impacted by settler colonial violence. We emphasize our solidarity with Palestinians through sharing an intergenerational program that uses movement, music, and storytelling as a means to challenge settler colonial narratives while reclaiming roots and place. An in-person event at grunt gallery will feature a shortened film screening, panel discussion, and additional films by Rana Nazzal. The full program featuring Edzi’u, Jamelie Hassan, Hamidreza Jadid, Eddy van Wyk, Tʼuyʼtʼtanat-Cease Wyss, Sobhi Zobaidi, and Alize Zorlutuna, will be available to screen online from Dec 6–10.
Vines is an arts organization that is responsive to and nurturing of artists that are working toward land, water, and relational justice. Founded in 2015, Vines supports marginalized artists in developing their work, while also hosting an annual festival and year-round events. Vines brings imagination into everyday spaces by presenting work for free in populated public spaces in Vancouver and throughout the province. We advocate for artists’ well-being and center anti-oppressive community care without bureaucracy.
Partners
Films
Olives for Peace
Jamelie Hassan
Jamelie Hassan’s Olives for Peace (2003) presents video footage of a young child, her great-niece, outside eating olives. Images of ceramic tiles from her series Palestine’s Children (1990) are montaged into the video. The tiles are based on paintings by Salwa al Sawalhy, whose work records her daily life in the Rafah Refugee Camp in Gaza. The two artists engage in an artistic dialogue that responds to a particular context – life as seen by a Palestinian child.
Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist and activist based in London, Ontario. Since the 1970’s, she has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. She is also active as a lecturer, writer and independent curator and has travelled and worked globally. In 2001 she received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in recognition of her artistic achievement. Her activism, curatorial work and contributions to the artist-run centre movement in Canada were also mentioned by the jury in their statement.
My Very Private Map
Sobhi Zobaidi
Sobhi Zobaidi’s first and – as the title indicates – very personal film was made on the 50th anniversary of Nakba. Following in the tracks of the map of the title, fragments are brought together by fragile, precious links: an old ceramic pot, a fading letter. In interviews the Intifada is defended and the speakers do not shirk from confronting the narrator with their frank opinions. But sitting with a few stoic old men, the narrator is brought back down to earth. My Very Private Map is a lyrical ode to Palestine; not a film that puts tears in your eyes, but one that reminds you of your ability to cry.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi, independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar, has made a number of award winning documentaries, short fiction, art videos and multimedia installations, and since 1998, he has been an active member of the new and independent film movement in the occupied Palestine. Al-Zobaidi studied cinema at New York University and has taught film and media at Birzeit Universiy and Al-Quds University as well as published reviews in both English and Arabic of Palestinian cinema, art and politics.
Kultsia: The Art of the Apology
Tʼuyʼtʼtanat-Cease Wyss
This work was part of my personal research with my mother, Kultsia-Barbara Wyss, who spent 7 years in the St Paul’s Residential School and went on to spend another 5 years in Day School, through St Edmonds. Both of these schools were/are in North Vancouver and are walking distance from where my mother grew up. It is a conversation over tea, about her time at Residential School, and how she witnessed her life from a young girl to her elder hood, and the many challenges she faced as well as endured as a result of attending these schools. It is a legacy piece that I created for her grandchildren to hear her personal story.
T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss (Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo, Hawaiian, Swiss) is an educator, interdisciplinary artist and Indigenous ethnobotanist engaged in community based teaching and sharing. Throughout Wyss’s 30 year practice, Wyss’s work encompasses storytelling and collaborative initiatives through their knowledge and restoration of Indigenous plants and natural spaces. Wyss has been recognized for exchanging traditional knowledge in remediating our relationship to land through digital media, site-specific engagements and weaving. Wyss has participated and exhibited at galleries, museums, festivals and public space such as Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris, Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery and the PuSh Festival to name a few. Their work can be found in various collections such as the National Library of Canada, Special Collections at the Walter Phillips Gallery, and the Vancouver Public Library. They have lead the transformation of Semi-Public (半公開) during their Fellowship at 221a and they are the 2021 ethnobotanist resident at the Wild Bird Sanctuary. They have assisted in developing an urban Indigenous garden currently showing at the 2021 Momenta Biennale in Montreal.
There are many ways to open
Alize Zorlutuna
There are many ways to open was created in collaboration with Dursiye Dogan and her neighbour in Bodrum Turkey in 2022. In the video, hands are pictured opening different types of dough with an oklava (an Anatolian rolling pin) on the right side of the composition, while a text outlining what is happening in the video plays on the left side of the composition.
Alize Zorlutuna earned a degree in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University (2005), a BFA in Sculpture Installation at OCAD University (2010), and an MFA from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University (2013). She grew up spending summers in Turkey where she was immersed in language and material culture. Zorlutuna lives in Tkarón:to ( Toronto).
particular
Eddy van Wyk
particular was born out of a need to express gratitude to Vines Art Society and the indigenous peoples of the unceded Coast Salish Land where director, Eddy van Wyk, lived and worked at the time. It was created as a capsule of a particular moment in time as they recognized the deep divisions the status quo seemed to have with the Land and climate justice. Engaging in the mythical archetype of a non-binary King and Queen, Eddy and co-performer Arash Khakpour allowed themselves to be here, now in the middle of a bustling city arriving from another time completely.
Eddy van Wyk is a Namibian-born multi-disciplinary artist currently in so-called Vancouver, where they live and create on unceded territories. After studying Presence for 9 years with Master Grotowski teacher Raina von Waldenburg, I am now studying my Masters in Quantum Science. I continue to investigate the meeting points of creativity, spirituality, responsibility and intentional embodiments. After a long period of hustling as an actress, clown, filmmaker, poet and theatre-deviser, I am now focused on integrating my practice with the primacy of consciousness being my worldview. Today you can find me designing and hosting opportunities for collective healing. @hernameiseddy
your touch unsettles how I see
Alize Zorlutuna
Made while visiting family in Türkiye in 2012, your touch unsettles how I see emerges out of experiments that contend with the embodied experience of living a queer Muslim life. Indebted to Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2010) the work enlists the abstract forms of a Turkish carpet and the artist’s body to produce a kind of misplaced desire, a queer sensation.
Alize Zorlutuna earned a degree in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University (2005), a BFA in Sculpture Installation at OCAD University (2010), and an MFA from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University (2013). She grew up spending summers in Turkey where she was immersed in language and material culture. Zorlutuna lives in Tkarón:to (Toronto).
The wind carries their names
Edzi'u
The wind carries their names is an experimental performance art and sound art piece that depicts the current realities of urban displacement and Indigenous queer survivance. Interpreting the sounds of three urban parks on the unceded territories of the Musqueum, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, Edzi’u examines the current realities of these three places through movement and sound as well as their relationship to land and water in territories that are not their own.
Sound piece recorded at what is now known as: Crab Park- Lek’lekí, David Lam Park- Smem?chu?s closest village site, Strathcona- Sk?wa?cha?y?s closest site, in partnership with Vines Festival in so called Vancouver.
Edzi’u is an innovative sound and performance artist who paints stories of the past, present and future with textures, community voices and words, and her ethereal voice. Their music and sound installations have been featured on CBC Radio Reclaimed, Talking Stick festival, shown in Tkaronto’s film festival imagineNATIVE 2018 as well as 2019, while debuting internationally in 2019 at the Document Film Festival in Glasgow, Scotland.
Looking Awry (Hawal)
Sobhi Zobaidi
A Palestinian filmmaker, anxious for work, is commissioned by American producers to direct a documentary film profiling Jerusalem as a city of peace and harmony between Jews, Arabs and Christians. While in production, the filmmaker (played by the director) repeatedly encounters situations that undermine his best intentions. The reality of things on the ground proves to be much stronger than its representation.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi, independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar, has made a number of award winning documentaries, short fiction, art videos and multimedia installations, and since 1998, he has been an active member of the new and independent film movement in the occupied Palestine. Al-Zobaidi studied cinema at New York University and has taught film and media at Birzeit Universiy and Al-Quds University as well as published reviews in both English and Arabic of Palestinian cinema, art and politics.
Quiet on Set
Hamidreza Jadid
“Quiet on Set” is an effort to build a bridge between the two considerable disciplines known as Visual Arts and Performing Arts. This bridge is constructed by linking up a non-narrative music to a number of iconic paintings which are depicted by moving images to create an exceedingly complex media. The storyline has a surrealist theme and implicitly points to a number of iconic images of paintings in art history and human presence as a juxtaposition of man made things with nature scenes. The natural sceneries which are pictured as feminine phenomena in modern and
male-centered societies.
Music by Kauvero
Written & Directed by Hamidreza Jadid
Co-directed & animated by Mehdi Shiri
Executive producers: Zeeshan Rasool, Kauvero Producers: Nima Hazar, Afsaneh Visseh
Hamidreza Jadid is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on painting, sculpture and multimedia installations. Jadid’s work addresses his long-term conceptual dialogue with memory, history and politics. Recently he has been trying to incorporate music and sounds to his experience in visual arts and is cultivating the medium of animation for bringing music and visual arts together. He tries to induce the viewers to forget about their own preoccupations and concentrate on the task of decoding. In the other words, He attempts to make it possible for a historical pattern to continue in a more contemporary form.