Tents, vigils, signs and teach-ins: (un)rest take visitors inside student-made university

“We will not rest until liberation. Al Zeitoun forever.” The student-creators of Al Zeitoun University shared this line on July 29—the day their camp was dismantled by security guards and police after 78 days on Dalhousie University’s campus.

The pro-Palestine student encampment was built by a coalition of students from five Halifax universities. The Students for the Liberation of Palestine-Kjipuktuk has not wavered in its demands since then: that their universities disclose and divest from financial ties with Israel and denounce the 15-month war against and displacement of Palestinians, lest “our educational institutions remain complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the group has said.

AZU grew in front of the Henry Hicks Administration Building at Dalhousie University, where the president’s office and the board of governors’ meetings reside. Dal Security and private security guards dismantled the camp—including a library, classroom, kitchen and vigil—on July 29, while police officers arrived on campus to enforce a no-trespassing notice from Dal to remove student campers.

On the day of the decampment, SLPK members told The Coast they had to rummage through dumpsters at Dal to recover pieces of AZU that security guards had thrown away—including artworks, signs and parts of a vigil for children killed in Gaza, Palestine. SLPK members had asked to keep these because they belonged, or had been donated, to the encampment.

Now, many of these recovered artifacts are on view in (un)rest, a show that opened Monday, Jan 27 the Treaty Space Gallery at NSCAD, 1887 Granville Street.

(un)rest facing Granville Street. Credit: Owen Skeen

Owen Skeen, NSCAD student union president and SLPK member, tells The Coast that (un)rest honours and “activates” the movement’s intention through videos, photographs, a library, live performances and four teach-ins, open to everyone:

Tuesday Jan 28, 11am-12pm: “Border externalization and mobility apartheid” teach-in, with Saint Mary’s University faculty member Cathy Conrad, will go through Conrad’s research into these concepts that describe stark differences between people who are mobile and those who are immobilized through practices of entrapment, with a focus on stories from The Gambia, West Africa.
Tuesday Jan 28, 12-1pm: “Tatreez: the Art of Palestinian Embroidery” workshop with NSCAD student Nour Beydoun will teach both the history of Tatreez cross-stitching—a traditional Palestinian practice that goes back thousands of years—and the technique.
Wednesday Jan 29, 12-1pm**CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS** “Copy:Cut:Paste:Poster” workshop with artist Jordan Bennett will teach wheatpaste use and examine the role of graffiti and public art in political organizing.
Wednesday Jan 29, 1-2pm: “Occupation 101″ workshop with NSCAD student and Canadian Federation of Students-NS rep Alexina St. Pierre-Farrow.

The show was curated by NSCAD student Clem Oliver, in collaboration with artists and fellow students from NSCAD, Dal, SMU, Mount Saint Vincent University and the University of King’s College—all the schools whose students were a part of the SLPK coalition encampment. Oliver writes in a statement about the show that “in the past year, the student movement has experienced its strongest resurgence since the 1960s,” and that by curating artifacts “from Al Zeitoun University which date back to the pro-Palestine encampment” from the SLPK in 2024, “the exhibition analyses student-led occupations as sites of rest, unrest, art, and political action.”

Archival photos shown in (un)rest Credit: Owen Skeen

The show includes archival photographs taken during the 78 days of the encampment, an installation of a tent that was there, videos of the camp’s removal, poetry from a Palestinian student at Dal, Tatreez embroidery works, archival material including posters and artworks made at AZU and an installation of AZU library, which is the collection of books donated by community members and faculty throughout the AZU’s 78-days on Dal’s campus.

The AZU library in full swing during its 78-days on campus. Credit: Cathy Conrad

“It was a big step for a gallery actually to allow something like this to take place,” says Skeen, adding that the show starting at an Indigenous-led gallery “was probably not a coincidence —this is a gallery that’s able to pursue some more radical and timely themes.”

But now that the door is open, he says, “it’s possible to imagine something like this show expanding and being considered in different contexts now that this vision has been realized in this space.”

Skeen hopes that people who were “not in a position for various personal or political reasons to have experienced the encampment in person” will see the show. In October, NSCAD’s student union, SUNSCAD, organized Al Zeitoun Weekend, which was supposed to occur inside NSCAD. Instead, it happened outside in the cold because the administration resisted the event’s ties to AZU. This show marks a departure from that, although NSCAD administration did not respond to The Coast’s request for an interview.

“Creating a space like this within the context of an ongoing political project, and particularly having this take place at a university like NSCAD, which is itself complicit in the things which this exhibition is referencing and charging, particularly Dal, for being complicit in—the ongoing genocide of the people indigenous to Palestine—continues to activate this space,” says Skeen.

“It’s because students are still fighting for what exactly this show stands for every day that allows this to continue.”

He says the show’s curators are very aware of its growing, changing, self-constructive nature and “the potential for these ideas to be recuperated in the process of archiving them.”

Despite the show’s location on NSCAD’s campus, Skeen says this doesn’t give the school “some sort of social or political legitimacy through allowing this.” In the days and weeks before the show’s opening, posters of the show have been repeatedly torn down across NSCAD campuses.

“The show has gone through great effort to ensure that it continues to pressure NSCAD and to situate the moral and ethical failures of NSCAD in terms of governance and as an institution at the centre of the exhibition.”

Skeen says that though “it’s awesome that this was allowed to be put on, we need to stay focused on where the power is within these institutions and what interests that power serves.”