VCR VOL.4: Attrition

Video Commission Residency 2026 Presentation

VP is excited to announce an A/V presentation of three new video artworks created by the recipients of the Video Commission Residency for 2026!

Featuring new work by Herlinda Dalayoan, Christina Hajjar & Kaya Joan, these new works respond to the theme of Attrition in unique and inspiring ways. From Dalayoan's analog explorations of her skin's diasporic experiences to Hajjar's beautiful and moving 'Kiss the Wound', to Joan's exploration of the St. Lawrence, come celebrate the creative determination of these artists' newest works.

NOTE: Rather than a screening, each work will be available to view in a unique way in the gallery and will be looping throughout the night.

Gallery Presentation is ONE NIGHT ONLY!

What is VCR?

The Video Commission Residency is a program for commissioning the creation and exploration of experimental screen-based work. VP annually commissions three artists through an open call process and the works are then placed into VP's distribution program.

Synopses

Biologically Disconnected - Herlinda Dalayoan

Biologically Disconnected glitches the skin's movements and textures through analog video processes, viewing the body as a technological system that reflects health. The video questions how biological reactions within the skin and immune system are manifestations of memory and displacement. By investigating my own skin, I aim to deepen my understanding of eczema in relation to my diasporic experiences of existing within an environment my body was not made for.

Kiss the Wound - Christina Hajjar

A group of cousins visit home, looking for answers about the past. Through the emotional landscape of Lebanon, the body becomes a portal for ritual and memory.

Ghosts along the shoreline - Kaya Joan

Ghosts along the shoreline experiments with layering videos taken along the edge of the St. Lawrence River, to produce speculative, transitory landscapes emerging from processes of accumulation and distortion. Images of bodies and land extracted from a geography textbook published in 1905 for schools in Ontario, surface like spectres against shifting terrains, briefly appearing before disappearing again, glitching, mutating, and evading capture.

About the Artists

Herlinda Dalayoan

Herlinda Dalayoan is an emerging media artist creating works around cultural identity through analogue and digital lens-based mediums, performance, and installation. Born in Winnipeg, MB, and currently based in Calgary, AB, Dalayoan is a second-generation Filipino-Canadian whose work investigates identity through the ambiguous space between cultures. Dalayoan previously attended the University of Manitoba School of Art and is now continuing her B.F.A. at Alberta University of the Arts, majoring in Media Arts with a concentration in Time-Based Art. Dalayoan has exhibited work in group exhibitions across Winnipeg, including AceArt Inc. and PLATFORM Centre for Photographic & Digital Arts. She has also screened films at the WNDX Film Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (WUFF), and SALA Film Festival.

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(opens in new tab).

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.