“Flooding”: Dana Qaddah and Christian Vistan

Opening Reception: July 10, 6-8pm
Location: Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings Street
Exhibition Dates: July 10–September 4, 2026

Featuring artists Dana Qaddah and Christian Vistan
Curated by Gachet curator-in-residence Troy Johnson

Flooding brings together the work of Dana Qaddah and Christian Vistan. Both artists are working with and against images and narratives that circulate in the wake of disaster. Drawing on countervisual strategies, Qaddah and Vistan offer distinct approaches toward a sharedprovide different approaches toward a similar goal: pushing back against the passive consumption of disaster media.

Countervisuality, as coined by Nicholas Mirzoeff, is a claim to reciprocity made by those who have historically been subjects of the imperial gaze. This “right to look” sits in direct opposition to visuality, which refers to the omniscience claimed by those in power.[1] Through the production and circulation of images of precarity, visuality creates a perceived knowledge of the other that has historically served to justify the governance and control of the subaltern. Flooding considers disaster media as export, examining the way in which its circulation permits those in the Global North to believe that such forms precarity belong elsewhere. 

Through sonic, literary, and material practices, Qaddah and Vistan challenge reductive representations of catastrophe, foregrounding the singularity of lived experience and the complex relations that emerge through witnessing. In doing so, Flooding approaches disaster while simultaneously rendering the viewer visible. 

[1]Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, 2011.