Art Windsor-Essex respectfully acknowledges that we are located on Anishinaabe Territory – the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Today the Anishinaabe of the Three Fires Confederacy are represented by Bkejwanong. We want to state our respect for the ancestral and ongoing authority of Walpole Island First Nation over its Territory.
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Safa Youness: غربة / Ghurba
December 5, 2024 - February 17, 2025
Dry Goods Gallery, 1012 Drouillard Road, Ford City
Artist Talk and Reception: December 5th, 5-7pm
My work centres the strength embodied through generations of my family’s survival – displacement from Palestine in 1948, life in the Ain El Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, and my journey here on Turtle Island.
This installation recreates my grandmother’s living room in the refugee camp, a space where many family photos were taken, telling stories of love, resilience, and resistance. Just as we share family photos in our homes, I invite you to witness these intimate scenes of survival – as affirmations of resistance, relationship, and love.
Through photographs taken by my family in the 1970s, I reflect on the strength and humanity that persists in the face of colonial violence. As I witness the ongoing genocide of my people, these images provide a sense of comfort, solidarity, and belonging. “The oppressor can never be a trusted historian. Our task is preservation. Collective memory is a liberation practice. Remember and tell it,” writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley reminds us.
This work is my act of preservation: a way to honour the resilience of my people and share their stories.
–Safa Youness
James Baldwin once wrote, “To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live.” Visual art that moves us, moves us closer together. We become more human through the human encounters that art enables.
Witnessing Safa Youness’ residency at AWE has been a rare opportunity to see an emerging artist engage with the responsibility and ethics of representation. Safa is inviting us into a deeply personal space—her grandmother’s living room—to demonstrate the intergenerational resilience of her remarkable family. The photographs are her family’s photographs, created first for family to share, celebrate, honour, and remember. What are our roles as guests in this space? As witnesses to these personal snapshots? And what is it that we should take away from this intimate encounter?
We have been honoured to host Safa at AWE during her residency. We are now proud to present غربة / Ghurba alongside our residency partner Dry Goods Gallery, with support from the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artist Project.
–Emily McKibbon, Head, Exhibitions and Collection
About the artist: Safa Youness (صفا يونس)
Safa Youness (صفا يونس) – is a Palestinian artist contending with the reality of living on the stolen land of Turtle Island.
To remember and express the joy (سعادة), resistance (مقاومة) and steadfastness (صمود) of her loved ones, familiar and unfamiliar, she reflects on photographs taken by her family members during the 1970’s in the refugee camp of Ein El-Hilweh, south Lebanon.
She centres the experience of Palestinian life in diaspora following the Nakba – her family’s history of displacement in Lebanon. Her work is a practice in remembrance.
Image Caption:
Safa Youness, Communal Eating in Grandparents Living Room. Image courtesy the artist.
