Reassemblage in the Relational Film by Nadia Shihab

Sun Sep 28, 2025

Production

Blurred old family photo of a large group of people sitting on a picnic blanket. The image has a textural overlay from a double exposure of foliage. — Nadia Shihab, *Echolocation*, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

Tickets & Info

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When Sun Sep 28, 2025

Price $15 ($12 Walker members, seniors, and students)

Mizna’s 19th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival closes with a pair of special screenings and a reception copresented with the Walker. Join us for drinks and snacks following this screening, from 5:15 to 7 pm, in the Main Lobby.

In her lecture-performance “Reassemblage in the Relational Film,” Nadia Shihab explores how her filmmaking practice responds to rupture and loss through the reworking of fragments, while centering intergenerational collaboration, sound and multiple voices, the feminist archive, and resistance. The lecture will include a screening of three recent short films by Shihab.

A conversation with artist Nadia Shihab follows the program.

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Program

our voices in reverse (portrait of mama)
2013/2022, US/Canada, DCP, 3 min.

Echolocation
2021, US/Canada, DCP, in Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English with English subtitles, 9 min.

Sister Mother Lover Child
2023, US/Canada, DCP, Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English, 18 min.

Bios

Raised in west Texas by parents from Iraq and Yemen, Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker, artist, and assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Working primarily across film and sound, her projects reflect an interest in feeling and form, feminist subjectivity, counter-narrative, and experimentation. Her films include Sister Mother Lover Child, Echolocation, Amal’s Garden, and Jaddoland, which was awarded the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts, a Fulbright Scholar, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work has screened in festivals and galleries, including at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Cairo International Film Festival, and Walker Art Center. Shihab’s creative practice follows more than a decade of work as a community practitioner, with graduate training in urban planning that grounds her approach within critical understandings of power, inequity, and the production of space.

A woman-led contemporary arts organization, for 25 years Mizna has promoted experimental approaches to art, literature, and film, work that questions and expands the forms and conceptual frameworks of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) culture. The organization publishes a biannual print literary and art journal, Mizna, and Mizna Online. Producer of the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, Mizna also offers readings, film series, performances, public art commissions, and community events that have featured 1000+ local and transnational writers, filmmakers, and artists.

Twin Cities Arab Film Festival: Closing Day

Showcasing contemporary cinema made by Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) filmmakers, the full festival runs September 24–28 at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis. For schedule and festival pass information, visit mizna.org.

Accessibility

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For questions about accessibility, or to request additional accommodations, call 612-375-7564, or email access@walkerart.org.