Flooding: Dana Qaddah and Christian Vistan
Opening Reception: July 10, 6-8pm
Location: Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings Street
Exhibition Dates: July 11–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 shared goal: disrupting the normalization of environmental fragility and to unfasten its coupling to those in the 'Global South'. 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). It is precisely this concept of visuality—the synthesis of images and ideas and the creation of a perceived knowledge of the other—that provides justification for the control of the subaltern. If images of disaster are how we come to know others, what opinions do we form and what assumptions do we make? Furthermore, if images of disaster are among the most accessible in the historical record, how do those of us in the diaspora relate to them?
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. Furthermore, it asks those of us within the diaspora to examine our longing and consider the ways in which we mine for connection.
[1]Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, 2011.
