Dislocated Visions brings together seven artists who rework the moving image to explore place as a layered and unstable construct shaped by memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Moving across Ukraine, Iran, Cape Breton, Mexico City, and the human body itself, these works reveal how histories of rupture and resistance continue to shape how place is seen, sensed, understood, and contested.
Part of Spring 2025
Dislocated Visions brings together seven artists who rework the moving image to explore place not as a fixed site, but as a layered and unstable construct—shaped by memory, displacement, identity, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies as politically and emotionally charged as Ukraine, Mexico City, Cape Breton, Iran, the deserts of North America, and the Atlantic Ocean—as well as the human body—these works attend 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. Sona Safaei-Sooreh 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. 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. Warren Chan’s Pixels of the Orient queers 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 across voice, text, and image. 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. Ella Morton’s Crushed Between Ocean and Sky transforms a maritime voyage into an existential meditation, where 16mm and digital imagery converge to explore vulnerability, endurance, and the scale of ecological precarity. 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, and recomposition.
Program:
Jordan Shaw, Reality Edits, 2:22
Petra Totten, my body is a place, just like any other, 33:06
Warren Chan, Pixels of the Orient, 8:39
Ayla Dmyterko, On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes, 9:55
Sona Safaei, Revolving, 1:08
Yuula Benivolski, 164 San Antonio Abad, 6:20
Ella Morton, Crushed Between Ocean and Sky, 24:39
Where: Online, through the Pleasure Dome website
When: August 1-8 2025 (from 8am ET on August 1 to midnight ET on August 7)
