Infiltrators: Film Screening & Conversation with Artist and Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar

Something to think about:

Khaled Jarrar, Infiltrators, 2012, film still, with title overlay

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 | 7:30pm
Thursday, September 10, 2026 | 7:30pm
Something to think about: Toronto
Get tickets via Eventbrite
Note: capacity is limited

Something to Think About: is honoured and so excited to welcome New York-based multi-disciplinary artist, Khaled Jarrar, for a screening of his “visceral road movie”, Infiltrators. Please join us for this rare opportunity to see Khaled’s award-winning, inspiring film, and to engage with him in an informal, collective conversation and Q&A over tea.

Infiltrators chronicles the daily travails of Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds as they search for ways through, beneath, around, and over a bewildering matrix of barriers across the West Bank. Moving between waiting, detours, cigarette breaks, sudden openings, and uncertain crossings, the film documents the ingenuity and tenacity required to carry out ordinary life within an extraordinary system of confinement. Jarrar treated his camera like a person being smuggled over the barriers, with tight close-ups and shaky, hand-held coverage, putting the viewer squarely in the action as a witness and vicarious participant. The immediacy and intimacy of the filming amplifies the cruelty and callousness inherent in the barriers.

For Jarrar, the film became a record of Palestinians’ resilience, and ability to sustain normal life under conditions designed to restrict it—something he said reveals “the failure of the Israeli security theories, and evidence of the impossibility to lock a whole nation within a wall. This film is documenting the way out.”

“I do it in the name of art, and I like how art gives us all this freedom and space to practice our creativity on the ground, not just on paper. This is how we can raise the questions and tell the stories that lead to solutions that will allow us to go beyond borders.”
– Khaled Jarrar interviewed by Rachel Riederer for Creative Time Reports, “Crossing borders, looking over walls”. March 14, 2016.

Images (left to right): Khaled Jarrar, State of Palestine Postage Stamp (The Netherlands), 2010, postage stamps published by TNT Express, Hoofddorp. Khaled Jarrar, Blood for Sale – a performance on Wall St, NYC. 2018. Photo: Stefan Hagen.

Khaled Jarrar’s multi-disciplinary work encompassing film, photography, performance, painting and sculpture explores modern power struggles and their sociocultural impact on ordinary citizens. His 20 year practice is deeply rooted in the complexities of the Palestinian condition, and incorporates themes of Occupation, displacement, and the tangible and symbolic nature of land and borders.

A recurring motif in Jarrar’s art is the notion of statehood and the struggle for recognition exemplified by his State of Palestine stamp project. His work often challenges viewers to confront uncomfortable truths, whether through the provocative gesture of selling his own blood on Wall Street to highlight the military-industrial complex (Blood for Sale), or by using an AR-15 assault rifle to create paintings (I Am Good at Shooting, Bad at Painting, and Gently I Press the Trigger). Jarrar also frequently uses elements of Palestinian culture and traditions in his art, among them the olive tree and its oil—powerful symbols of resilience, memory, and reclamation amidst ongoing adversity.

Prior to his fine art studies, Jarrar earned a degree in interior design at the Palestine Polytechnic University. To fund further education, he joined the police force and was quickly promoted to the Palestinian Presidential Guard where he served as a bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, while developing a parallel practice in photography. His first public exhibition of photographs of Palestinians, At the Checkpoint (2007), was installed on the fences of the West Bank’s Huwara checkpoint in a direct confrontation with Israeli soldiers, and for an audience of Palestinians, foreigners, Israelis, and the press who stayed to observe the checkpoint activity itself over many hours—bearing witness. He later studied at the International Academy of Art, Palestine, and completed an MFA at the University of Arizona.

Jarrar’s work has been exhibited at numerous international venues including solo shows at Galerie Polaris, Paris; Wilde Gallery, Geneva; Forum Arte Braga, Portugal; Al-Mahatta Gallery, Ramallah, and the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah. Group show and screening venues include Whitechapel Gallery, London; Institut Du Monde Arabe, Paris; New Museum, NYC; 7th Berlin Biennial; Palestine Museum; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, Marseille; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard, NY; London Film Festival; Sharjah Biennal; Thessaloniki Biennial; Alwan Film Festival, NY; Edinburgh International Film Festival; and the 60th Venice Biennale.

Khaled Jarrar, One Thousand and One Tins in All the Wounds to Close at Wilde Gallery, Geneva. 2023

For more information and to register, please visit Something to think about:

Understanding starts with looking, then seeing; hearing, then listening. It requires an openness to others and to the unknown. Something to think about: invites you to have collective experiences you want to talk about with others. Storytelling as a form of engagement, and a means to bridging the gaps between us.