Guest Post: Hot Coffee Conversation with curator Stefan St-Laurent and artist and educator Rehab Nazzal by independent curator and educator Anna Khimasia
Published Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal and Canadian curator Stefan St-Laurent talk with independent curator Anna Khimasia to discuss Nazzal’s exhibition Driving in Palestine, currently on view at The People’s Forum in New York. Nazzal’s photographs expose how Israeli systems of surveillance, segregation, and restricted movement function as tools of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, while also documenting Palestinian resilience and defiance. The work challenges dominant narratives, highlights Western complicity, and asserts artmaking as a vital act of resistance and solidarity. Khimasia has known Nazzal and St-Laurent for almost two decades and traveled with St-Laurent to Palestine in 2016 for a conference on art and resistance, organized by Nazzal at Dar Al-Kalima University, where she now teaches. St-Laurent has curated several major exhibitions of Nazzal’s work across Canada. Nazzal, who holds a PhD in art and visual culture from Western University, has exhibited internationally. Her recent documentary, Vibrations in Gaza, has won multiple international awards, including the Best Short Film Award at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
Driving in Palestine can be seen at The People’s Forum, 320 W 37th St, New York, NY, until December 13, 2025. The accompanying book, published by Fernwood Press, can be purchased at 1804, the bookstore at The People’s Forum.
Anna Khimasia: Imagine that you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?
Stefan St-Laurent: Mid-to-late nineties, Café Robinson in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, first thing in the morning. It was the Acadian Bohemian hangout, a lively mix of artists, poets, and outsiders at any time of day. Most of us just ordered the house blend drip coffee with cream and sat outside on the pedestrian walkway to smoke and gossip. If you wanted to know what was happening artistically or politically in Acadie, this was the place. Across the street stood Etcetera, one of the best curated vintage boutiques of the time—where, it’s fair to say, most of the Café Robinson crew found their best and worst outfits. If she weren’t on tour, the beloved songstress Marie Jo Thério would be there chit-chatting with everyone. She even penned the song titled Café Robinson, which makes this space live on.
Rehab Nazzal: In Kan’an Cafe, on the hills of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. I’m sitting in the open-air upper floor, facing mountains dotted with olive and almond trees, drinking rich and fragrant Palestinian coffee. I see the beautiful village of Ein Qinya, the stone terraces that the Palestinians built over centuries, amidst the stunning, diverse, and colorful landscape of Palestine.
Rehab Nazzal, Still frame, Healing Moments, 8:20 min, 2023.
AK: Your exhibition, Driving in Palestine, which opened on August 15th at The People’s Forum in New York, speaks to the reality of restricted movement and settler colonial control over Palestinians. What is your greatest hope for visitors to this exhibition?
RN: Driving in Palestine focuses on the Western-funded Israeli infrastructure of surveillance, segregation, and movement restrictions designed to fracture the Palestinian body and land. I hope visitors see that this same architecture and these systems established the conditions for the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which began in 1948, when the State of Israel was established over Palestinian homes and lands. This slow violence in Palestine is a form of ethnic cleansing that sustains the denial of fundamental Palestinian rights, including the right of six million refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced. At the same time, I want the exhibition to illuminate how this multilayered structure and rules of control, segregation, and fragmentation are countered by resilience, resistance, and defiance. The images in the show are documents of presence, endurance, and steadfastness.
SSL: The exhibition was first presented at Montréal, arts interculturels in September 2023, and since then, countless atrocities have been committed. For this tour to be relevant, we expanded the work to include more images from the Panopticons in Palestine series, which now numbers 100, along with more recent images Rehab captured in the West Bank. Presenting in New York—an epicenter of Zionist money and influence—we felt it was essential to bring a counterpoint to the dominant media narratives. We intentionally chose works with a strong documentary approach, so that the images would resist distortion or reinterpretation, forcing viewers to confront the reality they depict.
Rehab Nazzal, Mural of George Floyd on the Apartheid Wall in Bethlehem, 2020.
AK: How do you see the act of driving, photographing, or curating as a form of resistance?
SSL: As of August 11, 274 journalists, most of them Palestinians, have been killed by Israeli forces. The simple act of documenting life in Palestine has become a threat to the occupation, and I don’t think artists will be spared in this ongoing genocide. More than ever, art institutions must center the voices of artists living and working in their own homeland. In Palestine, even existing is an act of resistance. Rehab driving through the occupied territories is, in itself, a reclamation of land—defying barriers such as walls, checkpoints, trenches, watchtowers, etc.… Sadly, I don’t think this work could be created today without the artist facing imprisonment or execution. Rehab would become a soldier’s target for simply holding up a camera. I do see curation as a form of activism, and I hope that exhibitions like these force art institutions to confront the violence they perpetuate by appeasing bad-faith donors.
RN: Driving through colonized, segregated, and militarized landscapes is an assertion of presence where mobility is denied. To photograph obstacles that restrict movement and turn the lens onto surveillance structures is an act of defiance and a disruption of the colonizing power’s mechanisms of control. Curating works created under these conditions is an act of resistance against systems that suppress non-dominant narratives as they disrupt corrupt institutions, counter dominant discourses, and create spaces from the ground up, for awareness, engagement, and solidarity. In this context, making and curating art is an assertion of existence and a refusal to submit to oppression.
I believe that the ongoing genocide in Palestine has exposed corrupt global systems and international standards, as well as higher education institutions and art institutions. It has opened a space for cultural workers and educators to rethink their roles and responsibilities toward the present and the future, not only the past. In such dark times, silence, fear, and clinging to safe practices amount to complicity. The urgency of the moment demands us to reevaluate the norms.
Rehab Nazzal, Driving from Bethlehem to Ramallah, 2023.
AK: Along with large format photographs, there are 100 framed images of panopticons– or surveillance towers: Panoptics in Palestine (2025). Aesthetically, there are connections that might be drawn with the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but they function much differently. Can you speak to how you believe these images function?
RN: Panoptics in Palestine is not a formal work; it is loaded with questions about surveillance and control, settler colonialism, military occupation, and Apartheid. The series is captured from moving vehicles in an occupied, militarized, and heavily surveilled country, sometimes under the threat of snipers. Unlike the Bechers’ carefully planned images of industrial structures, Panoptics in Palestine documents Western-designed systems of control and surveillance imposed by a European-created settler-colonial state in Palestine. Each image is a direct challenge to the mechanisms intended to dominate the Palestinian people and their land. This is not a formal, benign, or static work of photography, but rather an act of resistance in motion.
SSL: The reference to Bernd and Hilla Becher was partly tongue-in-cheek. Their grids of German industrial structures are canonized—clinical, black-and-white typologies that sit comfortably in nearly every major Western art museum, MoMA included. Rehab’s work operates on a completely different register. These are not abandoned silos or water towers; they’re panopticons of occupation—militarized watchpoints staffed with soldiers, armed with surveillance tech, designed to control and intimidate. To place them in the frame is to call out the machinery of colonial violence. And because Zionist influence runs deep in cultural institutions across Canada and the U.S., Rehab’s work also doubles as institutional critique—it exposes not just the towers in Palestine, but the complicity of the museums that refuse to show them. Although celebrated around the globe, winning countless jury and public prizes, Rehab’s works are still not featured in any public collection in Canada or the U.S.
Rehab Nazzal, Panopticons in Palestine, 2023. Installation Montréal, arts interculturels, 2023. Photo courtesy of Montréal, arts interculturels.
AK: I know that it was difficult to find a venue in New York for this exhibition, even though the exhibition has traveled across Canada and is accompanied by a publication of the same name. How did it feel to finally bring it to New York? Does it feel different exhibiting this body of work here in the U.S. than in Canada?
SSL: It did feel palpably different. The U.S. isn’t just complicit in genocide; it is actively silencing and disappearing activists and many others throughout their own country as we speak. I was deeply worried about Rehab even being able to cross the border. For the tour, we reached out to multiple artist-run centers and galleries in New York. Most were either terrified to respond or simply ignored us. Still, it was important to bring Rehab’s first solo exhibition to this city. We were fortunate to connect with Terri Ginsberg, who encouraged us to approach The People’s Forum. They really welcomed us without hesitation and gave us two full floors to present the work. For both Rehab and I, that solidarity was the lift we desperately needed.
But the process has been eye-opening. I was stunned by how many museums and galleries have reduced themselves to propaganda machines for Zionism. The universal values the art world claims to uphold—freedom of expression, social and political engagement, fairness—collapse the moment Palestine is mentioned. That hypocrisy is devastating, and I’m still trying to reconcile it.
RN: It was significant to present Driving in Palestine in countries that are taking part in the ongoing atrocities against the Palestinians: funding the construction of the Apartheid Wall, expropriating Palestinian land, and supporting the building of illegal, exclusively Jewish colonies. These are countries that continue to arm, shield, and finance the settler state of Israel. Showing the work directly to the American and Canadian public exposes this complicity while defying the suppression of Palestinian artists and the censoring of Palestinian art.
Touring the exhibition, through the collective efforts of Canadian and American curators and activists, reflects how making and curating art in times of genocide is about engaging the public and shifting discourse. The collaboration, along with the events that accompanied the exhibition, raise urgent questions about the practices and responsibilities of art institutions in such times and about these much-needed alternatives.
L to R: Hannah Craig (Director of Culture & Communications,
The People's Forum); Rehab Nazzal (artist); Stefan St-Laurent (curator); Anna Khimasia (guest interviewer); Terry Ginsbeg (film scholar, Rutgers University)
Rehab Nazzal, Jenin, 2024. Driving in Palestine billboard, Queens, NY, 2025. Photo by Stefan St-Laurent.