Reassemblage in the Relational Film

Libby Leshgold Gallery is pleased to present an artist talk in conjunction with Nadia Shihab’s work, Sitting Room, 1987, currently showing on the Emily Carr University Urban Screen.

In her lecture, Reassemblage in the Relational Film, Shihab explores how her filmmaking practice responds to rupture and loss through the reworking of fragments, while centering intergenerational collaboration, sound and polyvocality, the feminist archive, and resistance.

About the work

In Sitting Room, 1987 Nadia Shihab revisits images photographed by her mother with attention to the inconsistencies at the margins. Placed alongside each other the images reveal an interior panorama, where the end of one image leads to the beginning of another. By looking closely at her own mother’s ‘looking’, Sitting Room, 1987 retraces moments of rupture and possibility by asking: what does it mean to look and look again?

Commissioned for the ECU Urban Screen, Sitting Room, 1987 revisits material from Shihab’s earlier work Echolocation (2021) exploring the translation of familial archives for an evolving public audience.

The Integrated Motion Studio (IMS) is located on the first floor of Emily Carr University, best accessed via the building’s southeast entrance closest to Carolina Street.

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker and artist working in the realm of experimental documentary. Her projects emerge through processes that are relational, and have taken the form of films, sound composition/performance, visual art and writing. She is the director of Sister Mother Lover Child (2023), Echolocation (2021), Amal’s Garden (2012), and the feature-length film Jaddoland (2018), which was awarded five festival jury awards, including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award, and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Sursock Museum (Beirut), Images Festival, DOXA, Black Star Film Festival, Cairo International Film Festival and Kasseler Dokfest. Nadia’s creative practice is preceded by over a decade of work as a community practitioner. She was raised by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Located outdoors in the campus’ southeastern plaza, the Urban Screen is a public art initiative of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program in partnership with Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.   

Offering 4–6 new commissions a year, the Urban Screen spotlights local and international artists and filmmakers working across diverse media disciplines of art, design, media, and technology. The screen operates daily from 8 AM–9 PM.