Art in the Midst of Genocide

Driving in Palestine

Artist: Rehab Nazal
Touring Exhibition by SAW, Ottawa, Ontario
Curated by Stefan St-Laurent

Vines Arts Festival 2025
August 9-30, 2025
Vancouver, British Columbia

Freedom School
August 9-30, 2025
Vines Arts Festival 2025
Various Locations in Vancouver, British Columbia

“االرجاء الإصغاء لأوامر الجندي Listen to the Soldier’s Order” is the first thing you see on a large black and white sign¹ before you step into the Vines Den gallery on East Hastings. You defy that, exercising your own agency you move into the gallery space where frame after frame of black and white photographs of Israeli panopticons² stare down at you. At the back of the room, a coloured projection shows someone driving through the West Bank.³ You watch in first person as the car pauses at a checkpoint, the anxious stillness amplified by the monotonous buzz of a drone overhead.⁴ It’s a reminder that surveillance under occupation in Palestine permeates even the most ordinary moments.

This is رحاب نزال Rehab Nazzal’s التحرّك في فلسطين Driving in Palestine multimedia touring exhibition presented by the SAW Centre from August 9th to 30th in conjunction with the 11th Annual Vines Art Festival, along with an accompanying Freedom School, a series of Palestinian cultural events and teach-ins.

Nazzal is a Palestinian-born artist and educator based in Montreal and Bethlehem. Over the years, she has observed and documented the colonial and surveillance infrastructure Israel has constructed across Palestine. What alarms her most is how these structures and settler colonies expand while steadily restricting Palestinian life and agency. Driving in Palestine continues Nazzal’s investigation into the movement restrictions faced by Palestinians, building on her earlier works Walking Under Occupation (2006), Divide (2010), and Choreography in Resistance (2018).

In an interview calling in from Bethlehem, Nazzal explained that she began photographing the panoptics in 2010, capturing them from a moving car with a quick flash.

“It’s impossible now to record what I photographed during those years,” Nazzal noted. “If I lift up my camera at a military checkpoint, I’ll be shot.” She added that in the past two years, new signs have appeared at some checkpoints that say: “No photography is allowed.” Each of her photographs has become a dangerous act of witnessing and resistance under occupation.

Nazzal explained that she chose black and white to strip away distractions and focus the viewer on surveillance itself, so that you “feel as if you yourself are being surveilled, creating a claustrophobic effect.”

Her exhibition has travelled from coast to coast, including Campbell River, Montreal, Ottawa, and New York City. Its production and touring were supported by Canada Council for the Arts, but despite the funding, the exhibition’s versatility, and its urgent relevance in the face of genocide, curator Stephen St-Laurent from the SAW Centre struggled to find exhibition partners and spaces willing to host it. Many art spaces in Vancouver ghosted him, unwilling to set aside their programming for more pressing dialogues, except for the Vines Art Society, which took the chance. 

Simply showing Palestinian work about occupation proved challenging, even in Canada, a country that claims to value truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The very presence of Driving in Palestine is an act of defiance against the censorship of Palestinian voices prevalent in artistic institutions across Canada and the USA.

And Nazzal knows this. “You are, we are, in Canada, so…brainwashed and…exposed to the Zionist narrative. Being Palestinian, it’s so painful to have to defend yourself. You’re a victim of the settlers and the settler colony. You defend yourself because of how the propaganda, the Zionist propaganda, spreads, infiltrating through educational institutions, art institutions, through the public, the media. It’s horrific.”

She recounts how she began as a visual artist, evident in a second room of mixed media art featuring an illustration of her driving path in Palestine⁵ and a massive apartheid sign she reconstructed⁶. But Nazzal said she eventually moved exclusively to photography, sound, and film, because “documentary media has a goal, has a mission. It contributes to countering that narrative that is spread deep inside the society in the settler state of Canada and the West.” 

Through the exhibition, she hopes that people will “take away knowledge about reality. They see what I see…I’m bringing my vision, my experience into you…to counter the abstract. I’m presenting facts on the ground as they are.”

Nazzal’s work didn’t stand alone, Driving in Palestine became a convening point for converging dialogues and engagement of Palestinian culture through Freedom School, modeled after alternative schools organized by activists and educators during the civil rights movement. Freedom School organizer, جيدا مصلح Jeeda Musleh, says they “envisioned a space that could offer something different, more creative, more related and relevant to world events, especially what is happening in Palestine.”

What resulted was a series of cultural events, workshops, and teach-ins all free for the public. Cultural events included poetry reading for Palestine, a documentary presentation of Nazzal’s films, an EMDR healing drum circle for activists, a دبكة dabkeh workshop, and a تَطْرِيز tatreez workshop, and more.

But what is the role of art during genocide? What does it mean to gather in relative stability, learning Palestinian arts, enjoying Palestinian music, and eating Palestinian food, while Palestinians in Gaza are starving from famine and dying in bombings by the Israeli Occupation Forces?

“It’s not my goal to have exhibitions at this point as much as what these exhibitions are creating activities around them, of discourse around them, of knowledge based on embedded experience like mine. That’s the goal,” says Nazzal, whose perspective echoes that of many Palestinian activists, calling for the dismantling of settler narratives, the exposure of systems of confinement, and active resistance to the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.

“It’s connected to what’s happening in Palestine in general, the past 77 years, and specifically this last chapter of genocide. That is my concern, that is my focus now, and it complements all other forms [of resistance]. We stop the shipments of weapons. We pressure the government. We sign petitions. We protest. But also, we make art.”

Nazzal’s animated affirmation stood in stark contrast to her earlier demeanour when she presented her films Canada Park (2015) and Vibrations from Gaza (2024) on August 11th, a day after Israel massacred six journalists and photographers in Gaza⁷.

Canada Park examines the destruction of three Palestinian villages in the West Bank, from which 10,000 people were expelled by the Israeli state to make way for a tourist attraction funded by JNF (Jewish National Fund) Canada. Juxtaposed against the park’s quiet, Vibrations in Gaza is a short film featuring deaf children. No words are spoken, only the persistent buzzing of drones throughout the film. Nazzal shows children playing innocently in the Mediterranean Sea, contrasted with their horror as they describe feeling the vibrations of Israeli bombings through their bodies.

“Sorry…” Nazzal began solemnly as she addressed the audience after the screening, “It was difficult watching Vibrations from Gaza and thinking what’s happening now. Each corner in the film, each image, each frame, is no longer the same.” She went on to recount the stories of each child and their families going missing or killed since the filming, with each story more gut-wrenching than the last.

An audience member added that there is also a bird sanctuary in Israel named after Stephen Harper also established by JNF Canada. Coast Salish community member and co-panelist Jada-Gabrielle Pappe points out the violence of quiet in both films, and compares it to the quietness of Vancouver’s streets and how the absence of sound came from the forceful erasure of Indigenous peoples. Members of the audience nod their heads in agreement.

Diverse in age and ethnicity, many adorned with keffiyehs and watermelon patterns, this was a critically conscious audience actively deepening their understanding of Palestine, its people, culture, and their plight. Freedom School seemed less about converting the unengaged and unconvinced than building upon solidarity among those already committed to Palestine. It was for allies who, during a tatreez workshop, was able to share a laugh together when Palestinian artist and instructor روان حسن Rawan Hassan joked that maybe one day participants would weave so well like Palestinian aunties that they could weave and “plan an Intifada” at the same time.

“I think it’s a really humanizing and wonderful way to get people to engage with the culture,” Hassan reflects on her workshop, “Most people just witness the violence we go through and people don’t really have a grounded understanding that we are not the violence that we on a daily basis go through. We have a rich culture that long precedes the start of the occupation. We’ve existed long before and we will continue to exist.”

She highlighted the generational struggle to preserve tatreez, noting how cultural traditions are often targeted for erasure: “It took generations to protect it, preserve it, and keep that tradition going, because one of the first things they go after is culture work.”

While the Freedom School events like the tatreez workshop attracted a diversity of attendees connected by a shared vision of a liberated Palestine, there were also tender moments of Palestinian attendees reconnecting with their culture and with each other exchanging a few words in Arabic or recounting how listening to the late Palestinian poet مَحمُود دَرْوِيْش Mahmoud Darwish in a poetry circle reminded them of childhood memories. 

At the Poetry for Palestine event, Palestinian poet سارة السوقي Sara Al Souqi shared a Nakba Day poem she wrote that began with her toddler’s fascination with dinosaurs and ended with a reflection on the possible extinction of Palestinians if current conditions persist. نظمي كمال Nazmi Kamal, a member of the diaspora who has not been able to visit his ancestral land, shared how listening to Darwish’s poem, على هذه الأرض On this Earth, a work he has encountered many times, almost brought him to tears, reminding him of the bread, landscapes, and seasonal rhythms of the land he only knows through stories from his parents.

Musleh, a drummer at many Palestinian rallies, recalled that the EMDR drum circle she co-hosted with therapist Eve Wilensky of Independent Jewish Voices was among the most oversubscribed events. Designed for activists and Palestinian movement organizers, it sparked what is now a monthly Palestinian liberation drum circle for connection and healing. “Freedom School was the birthplace of so many things,” Musleh reflected.

These intimate moments reveal how art connects Palestinians across generations and geographies, while keeping memories and culture alive through shared traditions and healing. 

Yet even amid crafts, food, and poetry, the question lingered: What is the role of art when genocide is destroying the very lives and culture we gather to celebrate and honour?

Musleh said it’s a question she’s deliberated extensively with other movement organizers. She emphasized that short-term activism such as rallies and political engagement are crucial to stop the immediate genocide, but the apartheid and structural injustices will still exist afterwards. Initiatives like Freedom School lay the seeds for equally important long-term work that spreads awareness, builds solidarity, and keeps cultural and political resistance alive.

For Driving in Palestine and Freedom School, perhaps the role of art was to create a space where Palestinians and allies could glimpse a future in which Palestinian culture and people are liberated and free to fully express themselves. It is a world where Palestinians aren’t like dinosaurs buried in the ground, but alive as teachers sharing wisdom and stewards of culture. A world where they don’t starve in famine or survive on breadcrumbs of aid, but nourish others with their ancestral foods, where Palestinian poetry fills bookshelves, dabkeh fills floors, tatreez adorns walls, and Palestinian music fills the air. 

“It was overwhelming in the beginning to see all these watchtowers,” says Musleh, who spent part of her life in Palestine, “But by the end…I couldn’t but keep imagining what would people of Palestine do in the spaces created after the watchtowers, checkpoints, and illegal settlements are dismantled…from healing centers, to kids playgrounds, art galleries, olive and vine groves…” And she has another ambitious vision—that Freedom School can be a permanent post-secondary school for liberation education—so that teachers can teach about Palestine more boldly in classrooms. From this view, art and education emerge as ways to hold space for Palestinian life, humanity, and possibilities.

As you walk toward the back room of the Driving in Palestine exhibit, the chirping of birds cuts unexpectedly against stark imagery of Israeli occupation walls under construction⁸ and surveillance cameras ⁹. Walking closer, you enter a space with colourful, moving images of a landscape filled with wild flora indigenous to Palestine ¹⁰. You are invited to sit, listen to birdsongs, take in the olive trees, and imagine a Palestine that’s not defined by violent occupation, but by liberation where Palestinians can move freely across their lands, and both people and olive trees can grow old in peace.

Though Nazzal is quick to remind us that this freedom is currently far from reality. “Why are the olive trees being surveilled or targeted?" she asks, “Last week¹¹, the Israeli settlers along with the occupation forces here in the Ramallah area uprooted thousands of olive trees. They killed, burned, and lynched the olive trees, some of which are older than the state of Israel and older than us all—thousands of years old.” 

The contrast between the thriving olive trees captured in her imagery, and the destruction on the ground highlights that art does more than imagine better futures. It also bears witness to what is being lost in the present.

In this way, Driving in Palestine and the Freedom School become spaces of both testimony and vision. It is where grief and joy coexist, and the humanity of Palestinians and the wholeness of their land are honoured.

Even in the face of colonial atrocities that threaten to destroy and erase them, Palestinian presence, culture, and solidarity can take root and grow here and now, so that their olive trees may flourish again.