Tiffin Talk: grammars
of return
Sunday, July 12th, 2026
Ocean Artworks Pavillion
1531 Johnston St
Vancouver
BC V6H 3S6
Doors: 2:30pm
Talk and Lunch: 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Accessibility Information:
For information about seating, parking, washrooms, and other accessibility information see Ocean Artworks Pavilion Accessibility Page.
How does dispossession, violence, and exile structure the lives of South Asian communities? In what ways are these experiences of ‘home’ (re)shaped by living as uninvited guests on Coast Salish lands and waters?
For Islamic scholar Abdul Manan Bhatt, ‘dispossession produces many grammars of separations, and it thrusts the dispossessed into daunting distances from themselves, their loved ones, from their sense of place as well as place-making, and from the different “afters.”’ As Bhatt puts it, ‘we are faced with new and evolving grammars of forced separation, which means we are also faced with the task of producing our own grammars of return.’
How might we think of grammars of return through language, water, and intergenerational inheritances? Join Farheen Haq and Renisa Mawani in a conversation moderated by Jasbir K. Puar, as they explore this question through art, ghazals, archives, and historical writing.
MAJOR PARTNER
SERIES SUPPORTING PARTNER
about the artists
Farheen Haq
Farheen Haq (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən territory (Victoria, BC). She was born and raised on Haudenosanee territory (Niagara region, Ontario) amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her family roots are from Bihar, India and Karachi, Pakistan. Farheen works with video, textile, installation and performance to explore personal, cultural and political reconciliations. Her current work is focused on the teachings of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb and how it can be applied to settler-Indigenous relationships on Turtle Island through culture making and ceremony.
Farheen has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally including New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. Recent exhibitions include I am my mother’s daughter at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023) and The Reach Gallery, Abbotsford (2024), Sentirse en Casa at Casa Cultura Gallery, Medellin Colombia (2018), Being Home at the Comox Valley Art Gallery (2015), and Fashionality at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2012), Her mid-career survey exhibition I am my mother’s daughter, organized by the Campbell River Art Gallery is currently on tour from 2026-2028 at galleries across Canada.
Renisa Mawani
Renisa Mawani (she/her) is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. From 2022-2025 she was a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.
Renisa is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History
Jasbir K. Puar
Jasbir K. Puar (she/her) is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and Professor Emerita at Rutgers University where she was faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years. Puar is the author of the award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, forthcoming in Japanese, and re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and translated into more than 20 languages.
Dr. Puar is also co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). In 2019 she received the Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.