Art Education Graduate student Amina Jalabi and members of the Flash Forward Photovoice Project
This week-end, Amina Jalabi will put on an art exhibition called First Flashes. It’s an amazing document of one year in the lives of a Syrian refugees as they undergo their journey of integration in Canada.
The exhibit is part of a larger project called Flash Forward that started in July. Inspired by the Photovoice model, where marginalized groups express themselves through photography, Jalabi and her friend Marwa Khobieh gave cameras to a dozen Syrian teenagers, and asked them to document their first year in Montreal.
It’s enabled the second-year graduate student in Art Education to see first days at school, religious celebrations and changingseasons through the fresh eyes of the young newcomers.
'Photography is a universal language'
Empowerment through the visual language of photography is the main focus of the project.
“I remember I was 15 years old when we emigrated to Canada. It took me almost a year to engage in a conversation in French or English. I remember how difficult it is in that first year when you don’t speak a language,” says Jalabi.
“Photography is a universal language and it’s going to empower them. In this exhibition, Montrealers are coming to see their work and there is this visual language that they are communicating through the exhibition.”
Jalabi told them to put away their smartphones and learn how to use a proper camera. She taught them aperture, shutter speed, light and the basics of photography as an art. It was a new challenge for all of them. Some of them were extremely shy. Some had never taken art seriously. And the trauma of war and dislocation often made it hard for them to open up.
“There is the Syrian context as well,” she explains. “There was not much freedom of expression when they were living under a dictatorship. Coming here, there’s this whole culture of how to learn to express yourself.”
