Programs & Events
Programs & Events
ART + FEMINISM 2025
BDS/PACBI Workshop with Artists4Palestine (Hybrid Event)
March 1, 2025
12 PM – 2 PM
Artists For Palestine will be joining us for a workshop on boycotts, divestments, and sanctions as a strategy to play an effective role in the global movement of justice for Palestinian people. Bring your questions about BDS and PACBI (Palestinian Academic Cultural Boycott of Israel), a boycott campaign highly relevant to scholars and artists. This workshop may be useful to individuals, as well as those shaping and pressuring institutional change. Snacks will be provided.
Registration link here
- This is a hybrid event. We ask that in person attendees wear a mask. KN95s and air purifiers will be on site. This event will have indoor eating.
- Childcare available upon request for in person events. Please email [email protected] if you require childcare minimally one week before each event.
- This year’s Art+ Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Centre A is highlighting arts and culture as resistance to genocide and occupation. Check out our events every Saturday all March long
- Registration closed February 25th, 2025
Artists4Palestine is a collective of artists and cultural workers dedicated to supporting the call for a cultural boycott of Israel until it complies with international law. We also work with artists and institutions to stand in principled solidarity with Palestine.
Edit Wikipedia: How To Get Started (Online Event)
Online Workshop co-led by Diane Wong and Maliv Khondaker
March 8, 2025
12 PM – 1:30 PM
Join Diane and Maliv online to learn how to make and use a Wikimedia account for editing and creating articles at the upcoming Wikipedia edit-a-thon and beyond. This workshop will include how to edit an existing article, create a new article, and maneuver your account. Come back to Centre A in person next week for our edit-a-thon, where we will be creating and editing pages that highlight the role of arts and culture in resistance to genocide and occupation.
Registration link here.
This is an online event
Zamin/Shared Ground: Ghazal as Site of Collective Memory (In person event)
A Reading Group with Rahat Kurd
March 15, 2025
12 PM – 2 PM
Can the exacting rules of a much-beloved lyric form give expression to freedom struggles? Can rhyme and meter provide tools for resisting forces of hegemonic erasure?
Join Centre A for a group reading and facilitated discussion with Rahat Kurd, co-presented with Rungh. We will explore how the rhyme and refrain of the traditional ghazal form, referred to by Urdu poets as zam?n or shared ground, can act as a catalyst for collective memory. No previous experience or knowledge is required to participate.
Attendees will be asked to read a few short poems in advance of the event, which will be accessible online. Snacks and printed copies of the texts will be provided at the event.
Register for access to the readings
Registration link here.
This is a masked in-person event. N95s and air purifiers on site. There will be indoor eating.
- Childcare available upon request for in person events. Please email [email protected] if you require childcare minimally one week before each event.
- This year’s Art+ Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Centre A is highlighting arts and culture as resistance to genocide and occupation. Check out our events every Saturday all March long
Rahat Kurd (she/they) is a writer, editor, and poet of Kashmiri and Indian family origin. The Book Of Z_ is her second book of poetry, forthcoming from Talonbooks this fall 2025.
Kurd draws on multilingual poetics, and studies the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. Their most recent ghazals in English can be read in the Winter 2025 issue of EVENT Magazine and online at Periodicities Journal. Their first collection of poems, Cosmophilia, was published by Talonbooks in 2015.
The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021), is a unique, hybrid book of correspondence and poetics exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five-year period with poet Sumayya Syed.
Her most recent essay, “Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali”, a close reading of the Kashmiri-American poet’s work in translation, was published in the critically acclaimed anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation, by trace press in Toronto in 2023.
Rungh is a Canadian magazine, news site, artist space, archive, and more. Founded in 1992, Rungh features work by IBPOC identified artists and communities.
Art Study and Edit Group (In person event)
led by Maliv Khondaker
March 22, 2025
12 PM – 2 PM
During this discussion group, we will be exploring the work of a selection of artists whose art resists genocide and occupation. We will be discussing the themes of the artwork, barriers to notability for racialized and gender marginalized artists, as well as adding to the artists’ Wikipedia pages through research and translation. Bring your laptop, curiosity, and art-nerd enthusiasm! Snacks will be provided.
This is a masked drop-in event. KN95s and air purifiers on site. There will be indoor eating.
Childcare available upon request for in person events. Please email [email protected] if you require childcare minimally one week before each event.
Wikipedia Edit-a-thon (In person event)
March 29, 2024
12 PM – 5 PM
This March, Centre A has been joining Wikipedians in the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. This year, we are highlighting the role of arts and culture in resistance to genocide and occupation. Come to Centre A for our final event of the month, the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon itself! We will be creating and editing Wikipedia articles about artists, artworks, and cultural movements resisting genocide and occupation.
Please join us in reconsidering representation and community in open-source knowledge platforms. We will provide help for beginner Wikipedians, reference materials, and technical support for making your edits. And snacks!
- This is a masked drop-in event. KN95s and air purifiers on site. There will be indoor eating.
- Childcare available upon request for in person events. Please email [email protected] if you require childcare minimally one week before the event
- This year’s Art+ Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Centre A is highlighting arts and culture as resistance to genocide and occupation
- Please bring your own device and charger for editing
Register here for our dashboard ahead of time.
Other Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Events Happening:
- Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Art +Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon (Thursday, March 13, 2025 – 11am to 3pm)
- Surrey Art Gallery x Rungh Art + Feminism Wikipedia (Saturday, March 8, 2025 – 12 – 4pm)
Film Screening: boundless returns
Centre A is excited to announce the film screening: boundless returns, bringing together four films by the artists Rehab Nazzal, Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Razan AlSalah, and Larissa Sansour.
Looking to how Palestinian artists are employing lens-based mediums to disrupt colonial framings and contribute to a living archive of resistance—the artists in this series turn to the language and potential of vegetation, archaeology, digital mapping, and memory as potent spaces to assert Palestinian presence, while questioning the limits and possibilities conjured by these returns.
The films will be on view in Centre A’s New Media Gallery from November 30 to December 14, with an official screening held on November 23 followed by a conversation with Basel and Ruanne.
Official Screening: Saturday, November 23
Time: 4:00 PM (duration 2 hours)
Location: Centre A (205 – 268 Keefer Street)
Canada Park,
Rehab Nazzal, 12 min
And yet my mask is powerful Part 1,
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, 8 min
Your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba,
Razan AlSalah, 7 min
Familiar Phantoms,
Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, 42 min
~15 minute intermission~
Artist Conversation: (duration 30 minutes)
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will be joining us over Zoom for a conversation to chat about their work!
