re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 5: Can’t You See What I Am Seeing?: Three works by Oraib Toukan, 77' ―

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Indoor Screening
Saturday 09 August 2025 · 6:00pm screening
CineCycle; 129 Spadina Avenue, Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

Oraib Toukan’s program, like the majority of her films, opens with a citation: “Featuring the voice of Gaza-based artist Salman Nawati.” These words situate the audience, orienting towards a geography that the films themselves will inhabit but rarely depict outright. Our eyes will be pinched into digital files, scraping across pixels and between film frames. Offing (27 min, 2021), Via Dolorosa (20 min, 2021), and When Things Occur (28 min, 2016) are dense, durational experiences that intervene in the digital scroll of cruel images, establishing a condition that cannot be tuned out or swiped away. These are works that directly address the representation of Palestinian resilience, and the unceasing punishment unleashed upon that resilience. Turning on the legible primacy of the image, the pace of testimony here dictates the speed of seeing, where the slow time of looming violence meets the immovable duration of Palestinian steadfastness.

Offing · 2021 Via Dolorosa · 2021 When Things Occur · 2016

Via Dolorosa

Directed by Oraib Toukan
Palestine/Jordan · 2021 · 21'00

Footage shot by the late Palestinian photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawharieh, slowed down, studied, and re-assembled with material from where it was found—piles of film reels discarded by former Soviet cultural centers in Amman, Jordan, accompanied with commentary by feminist literary and film scholar Nadia Yaqub. Via Dolorosa (Latin for the Arabic 'Way of Suffering') is itself a processional route that Jawharieh filmed in his birth city of Jerusalem.

Oraib Toukan is an artist and scholar. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine, and was visiting faculty at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah. Between 2015 and 2017, she taught at the Ruskin School of Art’s University of Oxford Graduate Teaching program. In Autumn 2018, she was Mercator fellow at the Cultures of Critique program at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Toukan is author of Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the essay-films When Things Occur (2016), Via Dolorosa (2021), among others. Exhibition venues include KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Mori Art Museum, Asia Pacific Triennial, Istanbul Biennale, and Heidelberger Kunstverein Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie. Her writings have appeared in a number of publications, collected works, and readers.