This panel brings together SWANA artists who work at the intersection of film and theatre, to discuss how these two disciplines enrich each other in their practices and beyond. Visiting filmmakers who staged their sets like painters, and plays that used the stage as a filmic backdrop, the conversation will reflect on the evolution of storytelling, performativity, and theatricality, while paying attention to the body as an actor and archive, documentation, movement, and staging, and raising questions about the future of this interdisciplinarity in the wake of the advent of new media such as XR and live-action capture.
We recommend attending our special screening called Theatre and Romance taking place at 4pm on the same day then sticking around for light snacks before attending the panel. Find more info about Theatre and Romance here.
Ghinwa Yassine (Lebanon/Canada) is an award-winning anti-disciplinary artist, art educator, and cultural producer, based on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh people, also known as Vancouver. Her work includes film, installation, performance, sound, and sculpture, and text and her embodied interdisciplinary practice is speculative feminist auto-theory. Yassine’s work is concerned with the body as a site where personal and collective memory manifest. She’s a shapeshifter whose practice is currently hovering in a gap between radical resistance and embracing an inner belly dancer.
Yassine was awarded the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities in 2023. Her first solo show took place at la Centrale Gallerie Powerhouse in 2024, and she was 3-times nominee to the Lind Prize at Polygon Gallery. Her works have been exhibited in the Netherlands, Lebanon, the UAE, Canada, Iran, and Croatia.
She holds an MFA in contemporary art and interdisciplinary studies from Simon Fraser University, an MA in Digital Video Design from the University of the Arts Utrecht, and a BA in Graphic Design from the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut. Ghinwa has an extensive background in education, brand design and strategy, project management, and event planning and production, and is currently in the role of co-executive director with MENA.
Matilda Aslizadeh’s video installations are characterized by dense visual surfaces and unexpected juxtapositions drawn from a range of photographic, cinematic, and painterly influences. Deeply invested in exploring the critical potential of immersive spectacle, the ambivalent centrality of storytelling in human existence, and the fluid threshold between documentation and fictionalization, Aslizadeh’s work locates political thinking firmly within affective experience. Her projects have been exhibited internationally in galleries and festivals, including solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, AC Institute (New York), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and Emmedia (Calgary) and group exhibitions at the Audain Museum (Whistler) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. She is based in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, and xwməθkwəýəm Nations.
Aryo Khakpour is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, performance, theatre, and installation. Born and raised in Tehran, he has been involved in multiple theatre, dance, and film productions in Vancouver since 2006. He cofounded The Biting School in 2013, which was the company-in-residence at PuSh International Festival and The Dance Centre 2018 – 2020.
In his practice, he explores dynamics of power, implications of ideologies, repetition of mythologies, and cultural adaptation. He is an intersectional feminist; and he interrogates patriarchy and its harmful effects on people. His practice is heavily physical and surrealistic; it moves from theatre to performance art to dance to film and back to theatre; it deals with pain and pleasure; it is sex-positive; and it aims to queer the status quo. He was trained in devised practices of non-hierarchical collective creation; that is his favourite way of creating.
He is the recipient of the 2024-25 Theatre Replacement Accelerator Lab Fellowship, which focuses on international touring within the context of experimental theatre and interdisciplinary performance. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors for Leaky Heaven Performance and the MENA Film Festival.
Pegah Tabassinejad is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Iran, currently living and working on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Tabassinejad’s practice primarily revolves around the creation of digital and live performances, films, and video installations. Her work interrogates the intersections of digital and surveillance culture with identity; the dynamics of virtual and physical presences and absences; and the forces that shape the movement and perception of marginalized and female bodies in both private and public spaces.
Her projects have been exhibited locally and internationally at venues and festivals such as VIFF-Signals, IDFA DocLab, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, VIVO Media Arts, and Gallery Gachet. Her latest eight-channel video installation, Entropic Fields of Displacement, received the prestigious IDFA Award for Digital Storytelling.
