Settler (Dis)placement: Interrogating Home on Coast Salish Territories

Settler (Dis)placement features artworks from Helen Mintz, Elly Stern, Elijah Holstein, Shaurie Bidot, Sunny Nestler – a group of five local activist-artists coming from diverse Jewish cultures who share a personal or ancestral history of immigration onto unceded, stolen Indigenous land. In the summer of 2024, they convened as a cohort of the “Mother Tree Local Leaders Program,” with support from Sierra Club BC, and guided by səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). Their works in Settler (Dis)placement focus on reconnection to place through a legacy of displacement, and examine how the group’s individual and shared histories inform their solidarity work on the lands they now inhabit.

The show will include an informal discussion at 5:15pm, as well as a Call to Action to support əlilwətaɬ in their ongoing struggle against the Burnaby Refinery and protecting the Burrard Inlet from upcoming dredging.

Saturday, April 11, 2026 from 4-7pm

Gallia & Ben Chud Auditorium at the Peretz Centre

6184 Ash St., Vancouver, BC V5Z 3G9​

➤   How to Get Here / Building & Accessibility Information

The Peretz Centre is an 8-minute walk from Canada Line’s Oakridge-41st Avenue Station, and the exhibit is accessible by elevator or stairs. Parking is available on the street or in the underground parkade.

There will be light refreshments & snacks. This is a masked event, with understanding that not everyone is medically able to wear masks. If you are able to mask outside of consuming refreshments & snacks, please do.

This exhibit is supported by Sierra Club BC’s Mother Tree Local Leaders Program and the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture.

About the Artists

Elly Stern is an anti-Zionist Jewish artist, animator, and community organizer who uses visual storytelling to inspire change. With a BFA in Animation, she specializes in stop-motion filmmaking and experimenting with mixed media and repurposed trash. Her work is shaped by life in diverse urban landscapes and by the surreal relationships between people, cities, and the natural world. Elly is grateful to live and create on unceded Coast Salish lands (“Vancouver”), and is committed to intertwining art with advocacy for justice.

Sunny Nestler is a working artist and professor living on unceded Coast Salish territories. They are a co-founder of Bike Saviours Bicycle Collective, Tempe Zine Fest, the Vancouver Community Bike Shop Network, and VR Club, which are all spaces that work to make complicated tools and resources more accessible. Sunny works in drawing, painting, illustration, book-making, new media, and social practice. Their current interests are in Yiddish language revival, shoreline ecosystems, and next-generation holography. 

Elijah Lake Holstein is a multi-(un)disciplinary artist and composer, gratefully living and working on unceded Coast Salish territory. Drawing on traditional Jewish mediums like paper-cutting, printmaking, and spontaneous improvisational melody, Elijah approaches each piece and performance as the creation of a golem—brought to life with the sole purpose of unsettling the settled and settling the unsettled. His primary focus recently has been creating, exhibiting, and selling explicitly anti-zionist Jewish art to raise funds for his friends from Gaza, who are working to evacuate their families to safety. He has exhibited his work worldwide, and his tum hurts and he is tired!

For four decades, Helen/Chava Mintz, has been forging an embodied relationship with ancestral and personal place. She created four solo spoken word shows of Ashkenazi women’s experience which she toured in Canada, the United States, Germany, and Lithuania. Her literary translations include Vilna My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz (Syracuse University Press, 2016) which garnered three literary awards. Her writing about Jewish life, particularly Yiddish translation, has appeared in Words without Borders, BC Studies, and InGeveb and earned a Simon Rockower Award (2023). Through her weaving practice, Helen is exploring her relationship, as a crone settler, with the stolen Coast Salish lands she now inhabits. She is enthusiastic about working with the younger edgy Jewish artists in this joint exhibit.

Shaurie Bidot is a contemporary painter and interdisciplinary artist whose mediums delve into performance art, film, sculpture & ink illustration. Her work focuses on depicting and materialising the unique recesses of human emotion and abstract feeling. When working, Shaurie describes the dance between herself and the material as a flow state in which she feels the energy of a person, feeling or place and creates a form for it to exist within. Shaurie holds a combined bachelor’s degree in art history and museum studies from the University of Tennessee and Arizona State where she focused her academic studies and publications on decolonial theory and Latin American art. As someone whose own positionality occupies many realms as an Afro-Latinx, Queer, Neurodivergent and Jewish artist, Shaurie’s praxis is guided by her commitment to deconstructing western and heteropatriarchal notions of fine art and art theory and she hopes to one day be able to disrupt these systems on a curatorial level. For Shaurie art and the practice of creating is a spiritual one that allows her to externalise feelings and emotions outside of corporeal or tangible limitations. Art is an act of world-building. It is community activism. It is unity. It is love.

Image credit: Sunny Nestler