SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is thrilled to premiere the 16th iteration of Monitor, its longstanding experimental film and video program, in partnership with Images Festival.
This program approaches experimental cinema as a site where resistance and solidarity are not only represented but actively produced through form. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates ecology as a contested political terrain (Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing) and power as something that governs life and death (Achille Mbembe), the curators bring together eight films that reveal how states, religions, and colonial infrastructures shape bodies, land, and imagination. Non-linear montage, poetic language, and attention to non-human actors disrupt the authority of official histories, replacing them with intimate, fractured, and plural ways of knowing.
Hotels, urban streetcorners, sacred landscapes, and even domestic spaces become politicized witnesses—sites where extraction, displacement, nationalism, and authoritarian control leave their marks, but where care, labour, and memory also persist. By centering Indigenous, Dalit, diasporic, and subaltern perspectives, the program insists that resistance is not a spectacle but often takes subtle forms: tactile engagement with land, poetic refusal, archival re-stitching, and the reclaiming of ecological and bodily knowledge erased by colonial and state power.
In a time of global turmoil, environmental crisis, and intensifying border regimes, the works in Shadows Swept Far Away mobilize cinema as a practice of solidarity. Experimental form becomes a decolonial gesture, transforming attention, slowness, and fragility into political acts that imagine futures beyond domination, extraction, and dispossession.
ABOUT MONITOR
Monitor presents experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas. SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through Monitor since 2005.
Monitor 16 Goes on Tour!
Interested in hosting a screening of Monitor 16 at your organization? Please contact SAVAC’s artistic director, Abedar Kamgari, at abedar(at)savac.net
Sameena Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate in Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her research, writing, and curatorial practice engage with vernacular modernisms, photography, histories of science and technology, and digital cultures through decolonial feminist and intersectional frameworks of resistance and collective care, foregrounding labour, caste, migration, and imperial infrastructures.
Vicky Moufawad-Paul is the Director and Curator at A Space Gallery in Toronto. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis which investigates aesthetic strategies for South West Asian self-determination, including counter archives, opacity, and refusal. Her writing and curating has been supported by numerous festivals, galleries and publications.
SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) a not-for-profit, artist-run centre in Canada committed to increasing the visibility of racialized artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development, and creating a community for our artists. We support work that (in)directly addresses the ways histories of people of colour are represented alongside the story of ongoing colonialism on Turtle Island and post-colonial histories of the Global South. These works are challenging, experimental and offer multifarious perspectives on the contemporary world.