Reflections on restoration and resilience in the face of destruction.

Asking Keeley Haftner to reflect on her path to becoming an artist made her laugh––a magnanimous question to start with, I will admit. 

“I’ll summarize it in a single sentence,” they joked. 

That sentence, dear reader, would need to be the world’s most impressive work of simplification to scratch the surface of Haftner’s career—a journey that spans the Canadian Prairies, the United States and, now, the Netherlands, where she has lived and worked for nearly a decade. 

According to Haftner, art had always had a place in their life, but it wasn’t until a high school trip to Italy when they were sixteen that their understanding of what art could be shifted dramatically. On a stopover in Frankfurt, they encountered Joseph Kosuth’s Four Colors Four Words. Until then, her exposure had been largely limited to Renaissance masters.

“I hadn’t realized contemporary art even existed. Seeing that piece blew my mind. I couldn’t walk away from it.” That moment sparked a lifelong curiosity for art that transcends the purely visual. She bought a postcard of the piece, and years later, tattooed it on her leg as a permanent reminder of the work.

Haftner was raised in Meadow Lake and later in Saskatoon. Towards the beginning of her career as an artist, she was briefly enrolled at the University of Saskatchewan, where her time was marked by constant exploration. 

“I took a little bit of everything, Mandarin, economics, political studies, because I thought maybe I couldn’t be an artist for a living,” they recalled. 

It was a sculpture course that changed everything for Haftner: “I realized I couldn’t do art as a hobby. It had to be my life.”

That realization set her on a new trajectory. After transferring from USask to Mount Allison University to pursue a degree in Fine Arts, Haftner began exploring “relational aesthetics”—a term then used to describe social art practice. For those unfamiliar with the term, social art practice, or social practice work, refers to any artform that focuses on the interaction between artwork and its audience. Artists that use this approach tend to create pieces that involve social interaction and address societal or political issues. 

“I was experimenting with art that engaged the public: gifts, generosity, exchange. It opened up a new way of thinking about what art could mean.”

She completed her undergraduate studies on the East Coast, graduating Magna Cum Laude with a triple major in Sculpture, Painting and Printmaking, then returned briefly to Saskatoon where she founded Street Meet––a street art festival that aimed to shift public perception of graffiti––and later pursued a master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, she has performed and had her work displayed in galleries across North America and Europe.

Haftner resists easy categorization. “Some curators love that. Others don’t. They want an artist with a brand, a clear aesthetic. For years, I thought my inability to be pinned down was a flaw.” But a late-in-life diagnosis of ADHD and obsessive-compulsive tendencies reframed their outlook.

“I used to see them as weaknesses. Now I see them as superpowers. My obsessions, my inability to be linear. That’s just who I am. Why not make it part of the work?”

Instead of tailoring themself to fit expectations, Haftner embraces authenticity. “I begin almost always with waste material. I love matter; the history of it, the symbolism. Transforming discarded things into something covetable is exciting to me.” She jokes that her “silly artist statement” is simply: I’m a materials girl in a materials world.

Yet their commitment to waste is not only about aesthetics, it’s also political. In their studio, nothing is discarded. The fragments and leftovers are reassembled, reimagined, and reborn. For them, disposability is never neutral.

Haftner’s ethic of reuse stems from her upbringing. Her politics and identity as a feminist, environmentalist and settler Canadian have always been inseparable from her practice as an artist. “In the North, we’d go to the dump and spend ten dollars collecting things we could use in our home. Some of that came from class—making do with what we had—but another part was cultural. There was this ingrained belief that things shouldn’t be wasted.”

As her practice matured, this principle deepened into a philosophy. “It’s not just about using old materials. It’s about what they mean, their histories, their symbolism, their potential to complicate how people see the world. A material others dismiss as worthless can be transformed into something coveted. That act of transformation is itself a political gesture.”

This refusal of disposability extends beyond objects to people and communities. Living in The Hague, Haftner has been immersed in global conversations around migration, colonialism and especially Palestine. “It’s impossible to be an artist right now and not ask where you stand in relation to Palestine,” they say. “Silence itself is political.”

Haftner’s solidarity is not abstract. Her latest installation, a billboard project at PAVED titled 35 Sentences on Palestine, as well as her recent performance at Nuit Blanche Tesselescence (Flag Repair), make that very clear. 

She staged works that directly address the struggle of the Palestinian people, extending her efforts in a gesture that feels both personal to her and magnanimous in the face of such colossal tragedies across the ocean, weaving Palestinian liberation into her broader practice. The link, for her, is clear: “Objects, people, histories, nations—none of them should be treated as if they can just be erased. My art is about refusing that erasure.”

Haftner’s international experiences have sharpened her political commitments. In Chicago, she immersed herself in identity and philosophy. In The Hague, they found themselves at the crossroads of Europe, where conversations about Palestine are more visible and less constrained than in North America.

“Every friend I make here exposes me to more of the world,” they say. “The news I consume, the perspectives I encounter, they’re far more global than what I grew up with in Canada.”

This vantage point has also made Haftner more attuned to parallels between Palestine and Canada’s own colonial history. She often speaks with European peers about the struggles of Indigenous peoples—stories that are often unfamiliar abroad. “I carry those conversations with me. They’re part of how I represent where I come from. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Canada resonates with what I see happening in Palestine. These struggles are connected.”

Despite her global outlook, Haftner continues to draw deeply from her Saskatchewan roots. She speaks movingly about her grandfather, who passed away recently. A farmer and mechanic, he also practiced lapidary work (rock tumbling and jewelry making) as both a hobby and for supplementary income.

“Before he died, he gave me his old equipment. I brought it to the Netherlands, converted it to European voltage, and now I use it in my lifelong project Pot Shards.”

That project involves collecting waste ceramics and tumbling them into smooth fragments—“a reverse archaeology,” as she puts it. Rather than time weathering objects into abstraction, Haftner accelerates the process herself, returning objects to the earth. “I hope for it to culminate in my eventual burial—as my lifelong artwork.”

Another work in progress, Object Oriented Neglin, draws from the prairie drinking game Neglin, which involves nails, hammers and logs. Players race to hammer nails into wood, and the player whose nail is embedded last must buy the next round. Haftner reimagines it with a glass hammer made from waste glass and a log constructed from studio scraps. “The hammer is already broken in your mind before you even strike the nail,” they explain. It acts as a layered metaphor, blending prairie culture, philosophy and material experimentation.

Whether she is reworking prairie games or raising a billboard in solidarity with Palestine, Haftner insists her art exists within a network of responsibility. “I don’t want to separate my art from my citizenship. They are the same thing.”

One of Haftner’s most striking acts of solidarity came during her performance of Tesselescence (Flag Repair) at the Nuit Blanche art festival last month, which accompanied their billboard project 35 Sentences on Palestine, where they staged a live performance repairing damaged, torn and faded Palestinian flags––sourced from members of the community––in front of an audience. During the event, they restored old and worn flags using salvaged umbrella fabric to patch missing portions, replacing faulty grommets, and adding reinforced trim. 

For flags damaged by smoke bombs during protests, Haftner embroidered motifs from the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh, using alternating red, white and black embroidery threads. Through embroidering these specific flags, Haftner aimed to draw attention to the damage as a remnant of protest, rather than conceal it. 

Eventually once the mending process is complete, the flags will be returned to their rightful owners, transforming an act of maintenance into a meditation on endurance, survival and visibility. 

Restoration of something as simple as a nation’s flag can hold a monumental amount of power and significance. “Repair is a form of care,” Haftner reflects. “To take something frayed and nearly forgotten, and to insist on its presence again—it’s a refusal of erasure.”

For Haftner, such gestures link her material practice with her politics: the mending of fabric becomes inseparable from the mending of histories. Her materials remind us that what is discarded can be renewed. Her politics remind us that no people, no history, no nation can be reduced to rubble or forgotten in the wind. It is through resilience and resistance that they are maintained.

“I used to try to frame myself into something others could understand,” she says. “Now, I just focus on being authentic. That’s the only way forward.”

Looking back at the billboard launch and performance, Haftner felt moved. The turnout and engagement they received was beyond what they had been expecting. Members of the crowd housed a wide variety of people, including Said Abdelhadi from Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) and his wife Tia, curious Nuit Blanche attendees and student activists from the University of Saskatchewan. 

A notable figure in attendance was Haftner’s oldest Palestinian friend, whom they had not seen in years.  “The work affected him so deeply he had to step away for a minute. His family’s story is one of displacement: his parents left Gaza to give them a better life, but their old neighbourhood has since been almost completely destroyed.”   

They continued. “These are only glimpses of the countless traumas Palestinians carry: from being told Palestine doesn’t exist, to risking jobs and education by speaking openly, to being asked ‘where are you from’ despite having grown up entirely in Canada. For my friend, the sight of public solidarity broke something open—it gave him space to process some of this pain, even as the genocide continues. If nothing else had happened that night but this, it would have still felt worthwhile.”

In Haftner’s work, every fragment, whether a broken shard of ceramic, a frayed flag or a discarded story, deserves care and recognition. Their art suggests that in both life and art, the act of repair is an act of continuity—an insistence that what has been worn down or overlooked still matters. 

For students at the University of Saskatchewan, Haftner’s philosophy resonates in more ways than one. Her practice of repair and reclamation speaks directly to the histories that surround us here on Treaty 6 Territory, where Indigenous communities have endured centuries of attempted erasure yet continue to assert their presence and sovereignty. Haftner’s commitment to Palestine is not distant from this context; it is part of a larger ethic of refusing disposability, whether of materials, cultures or peoples.

For emerging artists and students finding their footing in the world, this is an urgent reminder that creativity is not only about making something new, but about refusing to abandon what has been deemed obsolete or unworthy.

Haftner’s art challenges us to ask ourselves: What will we choose to repair? What will we insist still matters?