Bodies in Motion
Bodies in Motion grew out of the Palestinian Intifada of 2015–16. In this video, Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal uses hundreds of isolated film frames of demonstrators from the West Bank. She transforms them into black silhouettes against a white background, then reanimates them in stop motion so the familiar imagery of the stone throwers takes on a universal quality. At intervals, the silhouettes shift into halftone black-and-white images recognisable as press photographs of young Palestinian protesters. Through these transitions, the imagery moves from the real to the symbolic, from moments of history to the urgency of the present, from the local to the universal.
This work focuses on the gesture of throwing stones and on the relationship between the individual and the collective body. When Nazzal made the video in 2017, her depiction of repeated Palestinian uprisings expressed the resilience of a people who, despite a vast imbalance of power, continued to resist Israel. In 2025, the images from 2015 and 2016 speak of a past since shattered with even greater violence.