SMALL GALLERY

September 5 – October 4, 2025

Hadis Fard (Xel)

The exhibition “Vertical Diversity” is a multi-sensory installation inspired and co-created by a rare watershed forest at the heart of Elphinstone mountain, aiming to engage the audience into eco-activism to save this forest, exploring how presentation can transmit earth-based values in a world facing unknown shifts in the face of climate change?

Forests are not simply collections of trees. They are complex, interdependent systems where vertical diversity — canopy, understory, root, and soil — sustains life. When deforestation occurs, this layered structure collapses. The same is true under colonialism: when cultures, languages, and peoples are erased, a vital system of global diversity is severed.

In the clear-cut or selective-cut forests of the Pacific Northwest, the absence of birdsong mirrors the silences left by other forms of violence. These are not poetic parallels. They are converging realities of destruction. Colonial systems do not only take land, they rewrite meaning, and extract from the force of life. They frame the devastation they cause as progress, spiritualize stolen land, and sell sustainability while accelerating ecological collapse. The greenwashed image of a livable future is built atop silence, denial, and selective memory. But the earth remembers. And they listen.

To listen deeply is to confront what has been deliberately silenced. It is to recognize the continuity between ecological loss and systemic oppression. Forests teach us to hear what dominant narratives ignore: that breath, life, and resistance continue beneath the surface. Against erasure, the earth keeps the score. They do not forget. Neither do we.

Hadis Fard (Xel) is a human being, a plant ally, living, and creating on the ancestral land ofSquamish and Shishalh nations. She is a multi-disciplinary artist, sound and visual composer, and poet using sound, music, geometry, and code to create multi-sensory experiences and bridgeart x tech. She holds a Masters of Computer Science, has a background in fine art, and has had a non-linear path in her creative journey. Fard’s muses are rooted in eco-feminine, mythology, spirituality, and collective consciousness. She has performed and exhibited in various festivals and venues locally and internationally. Her works have been exhibited in settings such as Ars Electronica (NYC garden), Neo Shibuya Museum (Tokyo, Japan), Theater Lab (NYC, US), Vancouver New Music (Vancouver, BC), and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. She has published science articles in the prestigious IEEE Journal and has previously been supported by the Canada Council of Arts.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.