re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 7: Recypher, 73' ―

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Outdoor Screening
Sunday 09 August 2026 · 9:00pm screening
401 Richmond Courtyard; 401 Richmond Street W., Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

DIFFUSION’s closing program tunnels into images themselves, permeating their surfaces and fraying their pixelated edges. Out of a deceptively simple question about belonging flows a layered and subtle resilience. Urban alienation, white supremacy and settler colonialism are confronted here, obliquely, in the form of a sly riddle where images and bodies come together in force. Belonging to the mountains and streams; to the harnessed technological discovery of the protest record, the sample, the remix; dancing in a circle of collective grief; a slingshot landing a stone right in the eye of the settler; a song of Africa; a code breathed aloud, Recypher is about home and the forces that conspire to turn it to a blur or a memory. These five works step into that blur and reclaim its power.

b.longing · mystery byrd Stereograph · Timothy Yanick Hunter demarcations; you have black eyes · Zelikha Zohra Shoja Momentum · Nada El-Omari maono mzimi/unbroken spaces of vision · Sonya Mwambu

demarcations; you have black eyes (cheshmâi siyah dari)

Directed by Zelikha Zohra Shoja
USA · 2023 · 9'00 · HD Video

Drawing its title from a song by Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir, cheshmâi siyah dari is a stream-of-conscious montage depicting collective bodies in a constant state of disruption, movement, processing, and grieving. It celebrates the body as a historical, domestic site of resistance through dance and movement, including found footage of ants carrying flowers, rubab player Ustad Beltoon interrupted, and Hazara throat singing across an imaginary landscape.

Zelikha Zohra Shoja is an artist, researcher, and غمخوار / grief-eater living and working on unceded Onondaga land (Syracuse, New York). Working across moving and still image, performance, and social practice, her practice moves between ecologies of interdependence, failures of image-making, and the transmission of memory.

Her work tends toward personal / collective mythmaking and ineffability. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in microcinemas, artist-run spaces, and institutions alike — including Goethe-Institut (Almaty and Tashkent), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna; upcoming), Millennium Film Workshop (New York), NAM NAM (Tokyo), silent green Kulturquartier (Berlin), among others.

She was recently awarded a 2026 Light Work Urban Video Project Regional Experimental Media Commission and a 2024–25 Fulbright U.S. Student Award pursuing creative research in Tajikistan and Türkiye. [↗]