Video Commission Residency 2026 Recipients
VP is excited to announce that Herlinda Dalayoan, Christina Hajjar & Kaya Joan are the recipients of the Video Commission Residency for 2026! This residency supports the creation of new experimental screen-based works. We received so many incredible submissions this year and thank everyone who applied. These artists were selected because of the strength of their response to the theme of Attrition and the clarity of their creative vision.
Herlinda Dalayoan's project Skin Landscapes will be an experimental short video that explores skin as an archive of personal and cultural history, drawing parallels between biological reactions such as flakes, rashes, and scars and technological glitches. As a second-generation Filipina born in Canada, Herlinda will reflect on how her body persists against environmental and biological conditions it was never meant to endure, using these micro-temporal processes as a lens for examining displacement, survival, and existence.
Christina Hajjar's project proposes to use charcoal rubbings taken from patterned glass doors at her family home in Qaraoun as a visual layer over moving images, combining the high-resolution scans printed on acetate with travel footage and voice notes to conceal and distort the images beneath. Like the doors themselves, the video aims to function as a portal, with the work's final destination left open to be discovered through the process of making.
Kaya Joan's project will layer archival imagery from a turn-of-the-century geography textbook with personal video footage, using glitch, decay, and transformation to explore memory, imagination, and machine perception.
The VCR program will run from July 27 – September 7, 2026 plus a public presentation of all the completed VCR works scheduled for September 18, 2026. We are excited about the work they will create!
About the Artists
Herlinda Dalayoan
Christina Hajjar
Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 Territory. She is interested in oral histories, found footage, and queer diasporic aesthetics exploring slippages in translation. Her experimental documentary practice often utilizes her own body in front of the camera to capture performance art as process-based research through poetic vignettes. Hajjar’s essay films have been screened and exhibited nationally and internationally. Her film The Landmarks of Memory received Best International Short Documentary at the 2025 Lebanese Independent Film Festival. Her film Don’t Forget the Water won the Jury Award and Audience Choice Award at the 2021 Gimli Film Festival, as well as an honourable mention for the 2021 Emerging Digital Artists Award. She is a casual film programmer and also writes and edits about film, including her latest piece “Holding Olives” published in Al Rawiya, following a Beirut screening of short films on agriculture and land sovereignty. Learn more at christinahajjar.com.
Kaya Joan
Kaya Joan (Vincentian, Jamaican, Kanien’kehá:ka with family ties to Kahnawà :ke, settler) is a multi-racial, interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Toronto/Treaty 13 and currently based in Tiohtià :ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, un-ceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. Their practice is rooted in storytelling, using illustration, archives and found materials to produce soundscapes, experimental video, sculpture and installation that engage the body, place and time. Kaya approaches making as an act of world-building, using practices of collecting, remixing and collage to intervene with systems of value rooted in extractive logics of dispossession. Informed by growing up in a city full of ravines, buried rivers, hip-hop and graffiti, Kaya seeks to locate memory, imagination and dream as sites of knowledge production and portals into worlds of multiplicity. Kaya has been working in community arts for 10 years as a facilitator and artist. Kaya earned a BFA from OCAD University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Intermedia Arts from Concordia University.