Frances Adair Mckenzie (born in 100 Mile House, Canada; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) works from a feminist and experimental standpoint. Her practice is articulated around constant research on form, staging, and materiality. Her baroque, sensitive imaginaries draw on digital and immersive technologies—stereoscopic animations in virtual reality, augmented reality installations—as she brings out their capacity to resist commercialization and their power to spread into reality to propose embodied fictions.
Abbas Akhavan (born in Tehran, Iran; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) is interested in the domestic sphere, where hospitality and hostility are sometimes interlaced. His work, combining drawing, video, sculpture, performance, and installation, is modulated by the specificity of the elements around which it takes shape: the architecture that houses it, the economies that surround it, the people that frequent it. In recent projects, Akhavan has turned his gaze to the outdoors, exploring domestic landscapes such as gardens, backyards, and other arranged spaces around the house. His works bring into focus the relationships between reproduction and mimicry through his use of various references drawn from the fields of theatre, landscaping, and vernacular architecture, among others.
alaska B (born in Edmonton, Canada; lives in Toronto, Canada) is interested in visual cultures from Asia and their reinterpretation, examining at the same time her own identity as a second-generation Chinese Canadian. Inflected with a queer sensibility and a real desire to break away from systems of categorization, her practice blurs boundaries among disciplines, races, genders, and sexualities. Her work extends to various creative spheres, including multimedia installation, electronic arts, performance, illustration and music, as she co-founded the experimental music collective Yamantaka // Sonic Titan.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis, born in Comox, Canada; lives in Vancouver, Canada), Peter Morin (Tāłtān, born in Telegraph Creek, Canada; lives in Victoria, Canada), and Tania Willard (Secwépemc, born in Kamloops, Canada; lives in Chase, Canada) form together this deployment of BUSH Gallery, a space created by an Indigenous-led collective of artists centred on Indigenous territory, experiences, and rights. BUSH Gallery explores ways in which art—its institutions, disciplines, and histories—can be modulated by centring Indigenous life, knowledge, traditions, and cultures. The collective offers decolonial, hierarchy-breaking methodologies based on epistemologies positing that bodies and spirits, like rivers, are in constant motion.
Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishinaabe, born in Winnipeg, Canada; lives in Winnipeg and in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) is interested in technologies and in the exchanges that they make possible between tradition and contemporaneity. Employing photography, sound art, video, and virtual reality, he creates works that are poetic and committed to bringing forth Indigenous cultures and knowledge while debunking the legacies of colonialism. His most recent projects explore the intersections between artificial intelligence and Anishinaabemowin, one of the oldest Indigenous languages in North America.
Jen Bervin (born in Dubuque, United States; lives in Guilford, United States) engages eyes, hands, ears, and minds in an exploration of intersections between text and fibre. Combining crafts and high technology, her works result from conceptual, scientific, and poetic investigations of matter. Dialoguing with and through materials, her projects take the form of poems, artist books, videos, and installations that stage embodied forms of language and tactile properties specific to textiles.
Anna Binta Diallo (born in Dakar, Senegal; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) examines visual cultures through the lenses of memory, nostalgia, and otherness. Inspired by her own life journey, at the crossroads of Franco-Manitoban and Senegalese heritages, her practice focuses on issues relating to identity. Through collage, her technique of predilection, she envisions cultural patrimony as a constellation in constant reconfiguration. Recollections, dreams, and forgotten stories converge in a personal encounter with global issues such as celebration of diasporic identities, consequences of historical traumas, the uprooting provoked by migration, and the need to attend to the symbiotic relations that connect us to other forms of life on Earth.
Charlotte Brathwaite (born in London, United Kingdom; lives in New York, United States) creates worlds celebrating people who have survived the ravages of slavery, genocide, and colonization. She re-centres their experiences, desires, and dreams by opening up spiritual, visual, and oral narratives permeated with poetry and humanity. Through her interdisciplinary practice employing image-based, performative, and discursive modes, Brathwaite offers sensitive points of contact for addressing the issues of social justice, identity, race, and power, as well as the complexities of the human condition.
Carolina Caycedo (born in London, United Kingdom; lives in Los Angeles, United States) examines the interrelations between humans and nature from the angles of sustainable development, access to resources, and economic and cultural equity. She combines her multidisciplinary art practice with an activist engagement through which she denounces social and environmental injustices. Through human-scale projects that foster collective work and decolonial approaches, Caycedo contributes to promoting relations of kindness and to creating sites of resistance where future solidarities are forged.
Julien Creuzet (born in Le Blanc-Mesnil, France; lives in Montreuil, France) explores diasporic experiences through the lens of cultural heritages, including his own. In immersive works that combine sculpture, video, poetry, and music, he highlights connections among imaginaries, social realities, and forgotten stories. He draws his inspiration from the Martinican poets Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant and their reflections on creolization, migration, and the figure of the archipelago – poetic and theoretical spaces where diversity and difference manage to be preserved, yet in a globalizing spirit.
Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa, born in Yuwi country, Australia; lives in Mparntwe / Alice Springs, Australia, and Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) is fascinated with languages, histories, and forms of knowledge discredited by colonialism and “militourism.” This neologism designates the pernicious reciprocal relations between the military and tourism industries, each propping up the existence and legitimacy of the other to the detriment of the bodies of Indigenous islanders and other racialized people, which both industries persist in apprehending as spaces to colonize. Combining performance, video, animation, writing, and installation, Eshrāghi renews futurities by reinstating them with Indigenous pleasures and identities. Their projects are aimed, among other things, at restoring marginalized voices, such as those of faʻafafine/faʻatama—people who identify as belonging to a third, or even a fourth, gender, or who have a non-binary role in Sāmoan culture—and healing Indigenous bodies, including their own.
Maryse Goudreau (born in Campbellton, Canada; lives in Escuminac, Canada) probes social, political, and environmental issues through works that navigate among photography, sound art, performance, installation, and film. She is interested in what has been relegated to the margin of official history as she creates narrative, pictorial, and literary spaces to bring these to light. For almost ten years, she has been fascinated by belugas, and has reconstructed their social and political history by creating a vast archive—a dataset and multiple art projects—devoted to these white whales.
Ayesha Hameed (born in Edmonton, Canada; lives in London, United Kingdom) explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic Ocean. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media – their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement, recurrent in her work, offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature.
Taloi Havini (Nakas Tribe Hakö, born in Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea; lives in Sydney, Australia) is interested in the sociopolitical history of Bougainville. Her ongoing investigation into the expanding environmental degradation of her birthplace is shown through the multi-channel video installations in her Habitat series. Havini employs a research practice concerned with her Indigenous matrilineal ties to her land and community in Bougainville. She delves into personal experiences impacted by the ongoing legacy of colonial resource extraction and the broader political issues of nation building in the Pacific region. Through immersive video, installation, photography, and sculpture, she seeks to articulate different ways of being connected with nature.
Tsēmā Igharas (Tāłtān, born in Smithers, Canada; lives in Vancouver, Canada) delves into the connection between bodies and the land, and challenges extractivism-related issues through Indigenous resistance strategies and methodologies. Her works are often articulated around interventions made directly on the land—either by her or by corporate mining industries. Casting a sensitive and critical gaze on materials, she offers narratives in which natural resources have their say.
Lisa Jackson (Anishinaabe from Aamjiwnaang Nation, born in Toronto, Canada; lives in Toronto, Canada) is a filmmaker who is interested in bringing to light environmental questions and past, present, and future Indigenous realities. In productions that combine different genres (animation, documentary, experimental) and techniques (multimedia installation, virtual reality), her hybrid, committed approach takes shape through interrelationships. Jackson envisages her work as an act of translation among humans from many horizons, but also among bodies of knowledge possessed by different forms of life.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan (born in Korea; lives in Berlin, Germany) builds her practice around the entangled relations between humans and nonhumans. Driven by her fascination with marine life, technology, sexuality, nutrition, and ecology, she creates installations in which organic materials and robotic creatures merge to offer a reflection on sociopolitical issues among the living and non-living. She probes the concepts of ephemerality and transformation intrinsic to biology in works that challenge agency relations, shifting the focus from human beings toward ecology as a whole.
Hamedine Kane (born in Ksar, Mauritania; lives in Brussels, Belgium, and in Dakar, Senegal) uses words and images to highlight the notions of exile, wandering, and movement. His intimate videos make migrants visible and audible and forge narratives about how they inhabit the world. Kane encourages encounter, welcome, and kindness by casting a poetic gaze at migrants’ resiliency. With his interest in the feelings, animosities, desires, loves, and conflicts that characterize how people relate to each other, he proposes to replace political time with living time.
Lara Kramer is an artist of mixed Oji-Cree and settler heritage, born in London, Canada. Lara lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada. She is a member of the first generation not to attend the Indian residential schools of Canada. Her practice includes performance, choreography, installation, sound art, video, and visual art. Her choreography, research, and fieldwork over the last twelve years have been grounded in intergenerational relations and knowledge, and her work stands out for the use of deceleration and the close and instinctive listening to the body as forms of resistance.
Kama La Mackerel (born in Pamplemousses, Mauritius; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) explores ideas about justice, care, love, and individual and collective emancipation in socially engaged and anti-colonial works. In their practice, which combines performance, photography, installation, dance, theatre, textile art, and poetry, they aim to heal the wounds of colonialism and multiply possibilities for being. La Mackerel addresses the plural state of violence done to bodies, identities, and marginalized cultures, and disarms them through queer and trans teachings and methodologies. In words, gestures, and images, they create assemblages imbued with resilience and resistance.
Candice Lin (born in Concord, United States; lives in Los Angeles, United States) investigates the cultures and histories embedded in objects and materials related to colonial trade, alternative healing practices, and bodily functions. Frequently exposing legacies of colonization and the racialized histories of virology and indentured labor, her works take the form of multi-sensory sculptural installations in which she uses living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains.
Chloë Lum (born in Sudbury, Canada; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) and Yannick Desranleau (born in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Canada; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) are a duo of artists who explore relations between bodies and objects, both of which are considered to be sentient and performing subjects. Lum and Desranleau’s works, currently in the form of installations, are situated at the intersection of performance, dance, theatre, music, and literature. The question of chronic illness—long-term illness that often gets worse over time—has recently permeated their work, as they approach reciprocity and engagement from the perspectives of restriction, time, and alienation.
Malik McKoy (born in Surrey, Canada; lives in Ajax, Canada) works toward dissolving borders between real and virtual, analogue and digital, weaving visual and methodological connections between these realms. Using painting and 3D computer modelling in parallel to explore the constraints and possibilities that each offers, he addresses different aspects of his daily life and identity. His resolutely kitsch aesthetic, bright and playful, is inspired by music, television, and social media, and casts a critical eye on the world.
Alex McLeod (born in Toronto, Canada; lives in Toronto, Canada) creates dreamlike worlds inspired by digital culture. He is interested in the dynamics of simulation and representation of nature, and he draws on the visual repertoire of video games to build surreal landscapes that are abstract and distorted. Although they celebrate the potential of 3D modelling and animation, McLeod’s exuberant and critical universes invite us to reflect on how technologies influence our relationship with territory and the environment.
Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe / French, born in Ottawa, Canada; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) is interested in representations of identity; her own Algonquian roots and cultural histories serve as fertile ground for her reflections. In her multidisciplinary works, industrial materials and seriality come into dialogue with vernacular objects or motifs. By bringing to light the inequalities and stereotypes that stigmatize Indigenous communities, she addresses the complexity of the issues related to Indigeneity, ultimately defined today as hybrid and timeless.
Sandra Mujinga (born in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo; lives in Berlin, Germany, and in Oslo, Norway) examines issues related to identity by delving into politics of visibility and representation, modulated more than ever by questions of surveillance and control. Through a multidisciplinary practice guided by intersectional feminism and decoloniality, Mujinga, an artist and musician, explores the mechanisms of observation and concealment. Inspired by digital technologies and the animal world, she probes the notion of presence and the political potential of its opposite: absence.
Adam Khalil (Ojibway, born in the United Snakes; lives in New York and in Copenhagen, Denmark), Zack Khalil (Ojibway, born in Newton, United States; lives in New York, United States), Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta, born in Sylmar, United States; lives in Montreal, Canada, and in Tulsa, United States), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit, born in Kichx̱áan; lives in New York, United States) form the current configuration of New Red Order, a public secret society that takes a critical yet humorous look at desires for Indigeneity and at the “authenticity” imperative that is often imposed on individuals identifying as Indigenous. NRO explores the attraction to Indigenous epistemologies and the ways in which colonizers attempt to appropriate them, both intentionally and unintentionally. Through interdisciplinary projects, NRO sets out to destabilize these colonial attitudes and expand Indigenous agency.
Thao Nguyen Phan (born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; lives in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) draws on the history of her home country, as raw material for a body of work that combines painting, installation, video, and performance. By examining traditions and how they trickle into the future, Phan poetically and philosophically addresses pressing issues such as the ecological crisis, colonialism, and food security. She sheds an intimate and human light on the mundane places and gestures that punctuate daily life. Her projects interweave real events, myths, and fictive narratives, resulting in what she calls her “theatrical fields.”
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache, born in Whiteriver, Arizona, United States; lives in Brooklyn, New York, United States) intertwines music, performance, and visual art to evoke the multiple identities and emotions that she harbours. Ortman, a violinist, takes inspiration from Indigenous musical traditions to compose “sound sculptures” in which her instrument—its strings, the wood, and other parts—are as important as the sounds produced. Her often collaborative projects intermingle physicality and abstraction, urban environment and nature, the traditional and the contemporary.
James Oscar is an art critic, curator, and researcher in the sociology and anthropology of art at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. His work explores how the complexity of identities and social forms (human and non-human) are disseminated in visual and performative arts. He is a regular public lecturer at museums, cultural and academic institutions. His most recent lecture was Exploring Landscape Languages Within Urban Simulated and Living Landscapes at the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference (2021). His latest essay publication appears in the book Rashid Johnson: Anxious Audience (Power Plant, 2021). His following publication surveys the current work of Rajni Perera and Nep Sidhu. He was a curatorial consultant for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present (2018).
Sabrina Ratté (born in Quebec City, Canada; lives in Marseille, France) probes the potential of the digital image through a practice combining photography, analogue video, 3D animation, printing, sculpture, and extended reality processes (virtual reality and augmented reality). Her work explores how environments, both material and digital, shape our perception of reality. She is particularly interested in architecture, immersive modelling, and mechanisms of representation. In her simulated spaces, she deploys synthetic flesh and organic beings, the result of various hybridizations that oscillate between utopia and dystopia.
Tabita Rezaire (born in Paris, France; lives in Cayenne, French Guiana) works at the intersection of visual and therapeutic arts and communication sciences. In her holistic approach, inspired by ancestral wisdom, she travels down different avenues of creation and healing with the aim of rethinking the body by intermingling the networks (organic, electronic, and spiritual) that define it. She invites us to free ourselves from Western hegemony and the arbitrary hierarchies that it erects regarding genders, sexualities, cultures, and systems of knowledge inherited from the colonialism.
Jamilah Sabur (born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica; lives in Miami, United States) draws on geology, geography, memory, and language in her exploration of the temporary nature of the world, attending to bodies (geological, human, oceanic, and others) as points of contact between past, present, and future. Her works, which combine performance, photography, installation, and video, are imbued with colonial history, migration issues, and human relationships with the environment. With roots in the idea of being, Sabur’s work probes what has disappeared from our sight in order to unearth buried stories.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (born in San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico) explores tensions arising from social and political interconnections inherent to the postcolonial Caribbean context. Taking an engaged activist position, she challenges the regimes of visibility that institute a hierarchy of what is shown, foregrounding—or suppressing—events, social groups, and minority narratives. Through their poetic, performative, and sensory dimensions, her videos blur the boundary between fiction and documentary. She integrates experimental ethnography, feminisms, and the participatory theatre of Brazilian playwright and activist Augusto Boal, who devoted his life to developing strategies that would enable people outside of theatrical discourse to express themselves.
Susan Schuppli (born in Ottawa, Canada; lives in London, United Kingdom) is interested in the role that materials play as technical and sensate witnesses to traumatic or violent events such as wars and ecological disasters. Through alliances with scientific experts and in collaboration with local communities, Schuppli brings to light the capacity of these nonhuman actors to inflect the storylines of historical discourse. Rooted in extensive research-creation work, her projects unfold in photographs, videos, and installations, as well as books, seminars, and research workshops.
Tejal Shah (born in Bhilai, India; lives in New Delhi, India) is interested in how gender, ecology, science, and sexuality relate to each other. A practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and permaculture, Shah seeks to expand ways of establishing connections with other forms of subjectivity and with Earth. Shah’s transdisciplinary practice, enlightened by Buddhist and queer thought, challenges dualistic systems in which the components are perceived as disjointed and opposed. Issues related to violence, power, love, and regeneration are probed in Shah’s videos and performances and, more recently, explored during workshops and in practical and theoretical study programs.
Erin Siddall (born in Burnaby, Canada; lives in Vancouver, Canada) reveals invisible environmental risks, hidden stories, and traumatic events by probing representation of the unrepresentable. In her mainly photographic practice, she strives to shed light on shadowy areas and on the arbitrary divisions between what is deemed safe and what is considered dangerous. Her recent work examines nuclear energy production, its impacts over time, and its often unobservable effects.
Miriam Simun (born in Silicon Valley, United States; lives in Lisbon, Portugal, and New York, United States) is interested in encounters between bodies, human and nonhuman, and techno-ecosystems—ecosystems resulting from cutting-edge technologies and globalized market economies with vast ecological impacts. Simun creates performances, videos, and polysensory installations in which hybridity and assemblage serve as a basis for thinking of a trans-humanist future. Many of her works are articulated around the idea of disruption and the feelings that it provokes, in order to propose new possibilities for living in response to the social, technological, and environmental issues that define the contemporary era.
P. Staff (born in Bognor Regis, United Kingdom; lives in Los Angeles, United States, and in London, United Kingdom) explores the invasive presence of discipline, violence, and work in the definition of trans*, non-binary, and queer identities. Their projects, often collaborative, combine performance, installation, and video to make perceptible how history, technology, capitalism and the law have fundamentally transformed the contemporary social constitution of bodies.
“Trans*” is an umbrella term for the different gender identities and expressions that a person might have, other than those defined by social and medical norms. The asterisk is used to encompass all of these identities within a single term so that they don’t all have to be listed (Conseil québécois LGBT).
Eve Tagny (born in Montreal, Canada; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) is interested in nature, especially the cycles, rhythms, forms, and materials through which it is modulated. Combining performance, video, and installation, her practice unfolds around the figure of the garden—a space that she sees as both natural and theatrical, based in power dynamics and colonial histories. Steeped in meticulous research, her works explore colonialism, corporeal sovereignty, labour, and desire, in order to debunk the hegemony of Western narratives about the idea of nature. Gesture occupies a central role in her practice, activating rituals of commemoration, interpretation, or transmission that challenge the histories and skills in which our conceptions of nature are rooted.
Susanne M. Winterling (born in Rehau, Germany; lives in Berlin, Germany, and in Trondheim, Norway) explores the alliances that might be made across bodies of knowledge, technologies, species (animal, vegetal, bacterial), and the material world. Interweaving documentary and fiction, she highlights how such alliances can inform various kinds of thought and awareness. She employs a range of media—sculpture, video, photography, performance—in a sprawling practice that probes different perceptual approaches and critically revisits representations of reality. Taking inspiration from both natural and digital contexts, she imagines the living and the nonliving creating aesthetic and political solidarities that could respond to current environmental issues.
T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss is an interdisciplinary artist, ethnobotanist, educator, and activist from Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Hawaiian descent. Her work highlights Indigenous languages and cultural elements, and often takes the shape of gardens created on brownfield sites, in abandoned yards between high-rises, and other spaces where she sees the need to restore and remediate Indigenous plants and ecosystems that previously existed there.