Diaspora (المهجر), shot on iphone in Vancouver during the pandemic, was born out of a random conversation between the artist and her mother about similar visual landscapes experienced by moving between Lebanon and British Columbia. This sparked the desire to visually express what words could not. Diaspora (المهجر (situates Lebanon in Vancouver by inserting the Lebanese landscape into the Vancouver one. It imagines their differences and similarities while capturing the complex emotions and memories tied to the Diasporic condition. Hopefully through this film, the Mount Pleasant and greater Vancouver community experiences the different layers of their identity through Vancouver’s landscape and various neighbourhoods shown within it. The latter are presented in the film in a way that can trigger different memories and different ways of belonging. Diaspora (المهجر (is a recipient of the Small File Media Festival Programmers choice award in 2021 and has been screened at the Film and Video Poetry Society symposium (Los Angeles) in 2021 and the HMM (Amsterdam) in 2022.
Artist Bio
Noor Ghazal Abouchehade (شحادي ابو غزال نور (is a Lebanese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations aka Vancouver, British Columbia. Noor’s work currently explores Arabfuturism and the diasporic condition through modes of divination, soothsaying and fortune-telling practices as methods of deciphering and speculating about pasts, presents and futures, drawing heavily from these practices found throughout the MENA region. She is also interested in pushing the boundaries of textile and fiber art by using unconventional dyeing practices. Noor is currently receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University.