Dislocated Visions brings together nine works that engage with moving image as a method of thinking through place—where place is not a fixed site but a layered and shifting impression shaped by lived experience, memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies from Iran and Ukraine to Finland and North America—as well as the human body—these works attend in imaginative ways to territories marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, and resistance.
Part of Spring 2025
Dislocated Visions brings together nine works by artists and filmmakers who engage with moving image as a method of thinking through place—where place is not a fixed site but a layered and shifting impression shaped by lived experience, memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies from Iran and Ukraine to Finland and North America—as well as the human body itself—these works attend in imaginative ways to territories marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, and resistance.
Working from within or across Canadian and diasporic contexts, each artist offers a materially inventive and personally inflected approach to how place is seen, sensed, and contested. Francesca Svampa’s dreamlike double-exposure film evokes a collective memory of Barcelona through fragile fragments of personal recollection, while Panu Johansson captures the poetic charge of light and shadow in a seasonally ephemeral Finnish forest using Super 8 film. Jaime Black and Lindsay Delaronde’s When Land and Body Merge unfolds as a long-distance collaboration grounded in care, reciprocity, and relationship to land—bridging Treaty One and Lekwungen Territories through a process of video-based call and response. In On Volya, Ayla Dmyterko conjures layered gestures, textures, and soundscapes drawn from postwar archives, Slavic folklore, and devotional iconography—evoking intergenerational memory and the persistence of Ukrainian cultural identity in diaspora. Sona Safaei reanimates mid-century British Petroleum mascots, exposing the entanglement of petro-imperial aesthetics and soft-power propaganda in the visual legacy of oil colonialism in Iran. Yuula Benivolski’s 164 San Antonio Abad reconstructs the history of a collapsed garment factory in Mexico City, layering personal memory and archival fragments to surface the lives and labors of women obscured by disaster. Warren Chan’s Pixels of the Orient reworks orientalist tropes through glitch, pastiche, and digital remix, interrupting visual legibility and resisting essentialist frames of representation. Jordan Shaw works with machine learning and bandwidth-limited processing on footage from Cape Breton, using algorithmic distortion to probe how digital tools mediate our experience of landscape under constraint. Petra Totten’s my body is a place, just like any other moves fluidly between interior and exterior terrains, tracing how trans embodiment and geographic dislocation co-constitute one another.
Together, these films resist passive observation and frame place as a site of disorientation and negotiation—where perception is destabilized, and meaning emerges through fracture, drift, embodiment, and recomposition.
Program:
Panu Johansson, Who Has Seen The Wind? 5:00 (Finland)
Jordan Shaw, Reality Edits, 2:22 (Canada)
Sona Safaei, Revolving, 1:08 (Canada/Iran)
Warren Chan, Pixels of the Orient, 8:39 (Canada)
Ayla Dmyterko, On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes, 9:55 (Canada)
Petra Totten, my body is a place, just like any other, 33:06 (Canada)
Jaime Black & Lindsay Delaronde, When Land and Body Merge, 8:17 (Canada)
Yuula Benivolski, 164 San Antonio Abad, 6:20 (Canada)
Francesca Svampa, Water and More Water, 6:12 (Italy)
Total runtime: 1 hour, 20 mins
Where: Online, through the Pleasure Dome website
When: August 1-8, 2025 (Online, Video-On-Demand, through a link on this webpage)
