Leila Sujir, forest documents (TFL 46), 2-channel video installation with large format stereoscopic 3D and 2D video projection, 2025. Technical director: Jorge Zavagno, Reading Room in collaboration with John Latour. Courtesy of the artist.
LEILA SUJIR | forest documents
LOWER GALLERY
AUG. 9, 2025 - OCT. 18, 2025
ARTIST TALK: AUG. 9, 2025 | 2 P.M.
OPENING RECEPTION: AUG. 9, 2025 | 7 P.M.
The installation forest documents brings together a network of evidence in video and audio along with a Reading Room of publications and documents. The installation provides an opportunity for people to participate in the exhibition by approaching the video projections and Reading Room with a sense of curiosity and wonder about the forest as an ecosystem and as a sacred host of living systems.
forest documents is the third artwork on old-growth forests from Leila Sujir’s body of work, forest! comprising three artworks: Forest Breath (2018), Aerial (2019), and forest documents (2025). forest!, which began in 2016, conveys a sense of the tangled stories of the Walbran, the old-growth forests on the unceded traditional territories of the Pacheedaht First Nation. Home to Red Cedar trees nearly 1,000 years old and biodiversity not seen anywhere else in the world, parts of Vancouver Island’s Walbran old-growth forest remain outside of the provincial park boundary established after the Carmanah Walbran protests in the 1990’s. In the Walbran, the protests took place at the bridge you can see in the video, and this old-growth forest is still at risk from corporate logging.
During the Fairy Creek protests from 2020 to 2022, old-growth forests near the Walbran became a contested site where over a thousand people were arrested for protesting, the largest act of civil disobedience in terms of arrests, in Canadian history to date.
Throughout her long career, Sujir has continued to reinvent the capabilities of film, editing, video, audio, and installation technologies within her artworks. Technical Director Jorge Zavagno has worked with Sujir since she returned from the first forest! production in the Walbran in August 2016. She appreciates the nuance, insight, experimentation, and technical insight Zavagno brings to their working collaboration.
forest documents represents a culmination of Sujir’s past research and artworks in Vancouver Island’s Walbran old-growth forests near Port Renfrew, B.C. The roots of the exhibition spread wide and deep, coming together in an installation of a floating, two-sided, video projection using 2D and stereoscopic 3D video. On one side, the 3D video is accompanied by a spatialized soundtrack of the sounds of the Walbran and on the other, the Reading Room offers an engaging space for viewers to browse the documents and publications from Elastic Spaces research lab colleagues and others.
The two-sided floating projection wall with forest documents is composed of three sections, each cutting between sky and ground with two distinct camera set-ups: an aerial camera on a heavy-lift drone, and a two camera set-up with a mirror rig on the forest floor:
Section 1: TFL 46 (Tree Farm License 46)
The floating aerial camera shows evidence of clear-cut logging and second-growth forests with video stills pausing and punctuating the moving aerial camera, along with the two camera set-up on the ground, indicating where logging continues.
Section 2: Emerald Giant
The floating aerial camera then circulates around the forest, lingering on the tree that local communities have named “the Emerald Giant.”
Section 3: Emerald Pool
Descending from great heights above the tree canopy, the camera’s gaze shifts into the stillness on the ground near the Walbran’s “Emerald Pool” with only the undergrowth moving.
Over the course of an hour, Sujir indicates, “the video moves from the forest floor to the canopy, from ground to sky and back again.” It instills a meditative, self-forgetfulness as viewers experience the forest’s unimaginable scales of time, size, and biodiversity. This video is but one document of the forest. It is evidence of the forest’s majesty and endurance, but also attests to the colonial extraction of natural resources that continues to threaten the ecosystem.
On the other side of the 3D video viewing room is the Reading Room, an exhibition component created in collaboration with Concordia University Librarian and artist John Latour. He brings his expertise as both a librarian and artist to this presentation of the collection of books Sujir chose. Located ‘within’ and beside the video projection of an old-growth forest, it offers a contemplative and active space where visitors are encouraged to browse, chat, form questions, and potentially, come to new understandings of the forest. The scientific papers, reports, curatorial essays, children’s books, poetry, and writing, most of all, attest to research and art-making being inherently collaborative acts.
Created with this exhibition in mind, along with future plans for distribution through schools and to the public, the chapbook Chronicles of the Forest is a transcript of Elder Bill Jones’s, speaking about the forest, put onto the page in the strategy of a long poem. John Latour, along with artist Santiago Tavera and the Elastic Spaces team, fit Elder Jones’s transcript into the chapter headings he worked out. In the chapbook, Elder Jones talks about the Walbran’s importance to him, how he became an unofficial leader of the Fairy Creek protests, and his feelings of respect and reverence for the old-growth forest. The format of the book offers pauses, with its interstitial Walbran forest illustrations by Elastic Spaces book designer, Daniela Ortiz, who drew from frames of the video. As a result, we as readers slow down and take time to look at the drawings. These pauses in the chapbook mirror the “rests” present in the video’s use of scans of the coverpaper embedded with cedar and salal by Tasha Lavdovsky. She explains the location where she harvested the plants: “[from] forests within the Diitiidaʔ (Jordan River) watershed, the Pacheedaht First Nation's origin site, the cedar leaves were cut from recently felled trees in a logging cut block, and the salal was harvested days before their forest was clearcut.” At the start of each section of the video, these scans of the chapbook cover allow viewers to pause, to breathe in the forest.
In their respective artworks, research, and approach to living, Sujir and Elder Jones demonstrate the generative possibilities of weaving together interdisciplinary stories and ideas. “It’s like a bird building a nest.” Jones remarks in Chronicles of the Forest, “...it will put the rough stuff around the edge and knit it, so that it will stay together… and I thought that’s so apt even in our lives so that they can hatch into other ideas.”
Text by curator Adam Whitford based on conversations, notes, and text excerpts from artist Leila Sujir.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Canadian artist Leila Sujir was born in India, her father Raghu Sujir’s homeland, where she lived until she was five. She immigrated to Canada with her family: first to Mont Joli, QC along the St Lawrence river where her father’s job took him flying in and out of Arctic; and then to Granum, AB where her mother’s parents lived, then High River, AB and after the death of Raghu Sujir in a small plane crash, finally to Calgary. She and her two brothers Roy (now deceased, during COVID) and Jay grew up within an extended family, with Bernice and Henry Horricks, and mother Ruth Horricks-Sujir who worked as a high school teacher. In 1998, Sujir arrived at Concordia University, Montréal as an Associate Professor in the Studio Arts department in the Faculty of Fine Arts, carrying out research, art-making, and teaching, along with being a Department Chair 2017-2022, and where she continues now, since July 2023, as an emeritus professor, artist, and researcher.
Over the last decade, she has led Elastic 3D Spaces, an art research studio-lab supported by Concordia University, where she and her team have received numerous SSHRC research grants including, “Elastic Forest Spaces” (2024); “Thinking Allowed” (2022); a Canada Council for the Arts, Concept to Realization, Media Arts (2022) for forest documents; and prior to that, SSHRC research grants including, “Elastic 3D Spaces: the old growth forest as ‘home’ space with an emphasis on land, healing, home, communities” (2019); Exploring Elastic 3D Spaces: bodies and belonging (2016); and Elastic 3D Spaces Research Workshop Exchange (2016).
Leila Sujir has been building a body of video artworks over the last forty years exploring family histories and Canadian histories, using visual and audio collage techniques. Often located within custom-built technologies both for the production as well as its exhibition presentation, the artworks bring together a blend of visual and acoustic elements employing documents from archival sources, fiction, and the fantastic. Her video artworks have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery (Liverpool). Exhibited in galleries all over the world, her work is in collections including National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Glenbow in Calgary.
We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
The artist would like to acknowledge support for the artwork forest documents from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and support for the research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), along with assistance from Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts Resources, and Hexagram UQÀM.
The chapbook Chronicles of the Forest received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV), Concordia University’s Aid to Research Related Events (ARRE) program, and Elastic Spaces.