Program Details

Water | Fluidity

September 11, 2025

McIntosh Gallery

1 - 4 pm

Moving Images: Canoeing the Black Creek, Dave Kemp, 2023. Underwater Magic World (pictured above), Cassie Packham, 2025.

Artmaking Activity: Silkscreening tote bags with Soft Flirt. 

Celebrate the beginning of Art Thrive with a commemorative tote bag designed by local artist Soft Flirt and see the silk-screening process firsthand, then, personalize your tote while spending time amongst the gallery artworks. The first 100 tote bags are provided; visitors may bring their own paper or t-shirt to print on. 

Water systems are often visualized as a stream or a flow, an elemental force that is in constant motion. Our program Water | Fluidity features new media work Underwater Magic World by Cassie Packham (2025) and Canoeing the Black Creek by Dave Kemp (2023). As water is an element that implies a fluidity, this program seeks to explore the tenuous breakdown between the virtual and physical, and how one might form new agency in their interacts with place through space-making in virtual worlds.  

Packham and her collaborator space/opal work collaboratively to build pixelated land-based works in the Second Life program, effectively destabilizing the distinction between physical and virtual worlds. In the virtual plane the viewer can interact with the artwork’s co-creator space/opal, who is not an avatar of Packham. space/opal is an operating system with personhood and their own desires and needs. Together the artist duo construct places within the expansive oceans of Second Life, digital spaces that represent movement in time. As an Oneida new media artist, Packham thinks about these constructed spaces as part of a Seventh Nation, an expansion of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, to account for ancestral digital environments. 

In Kemp’s piece, the artist uses a photogrammetic filming process while canoeing the Black Creek, exploring the hidden waterways in Tkaronto and investigating how the environment has been affected by urban development and pollution. Through an intentionally distorted effect created by the photogrammetic process, this 3D interactive video has a synthetic “goopyness” that references a digitally mediated environment, transforming the river into a virtual place that looks like it could exist within a videogame. Canoeing the Black Creek ruminates on degradations both ecological and digital, parsing through how urban infrastructures and technologies transform landscapes. 

Cassie Packham is an Onyota'a:ka (Oneida) artist born and raised in Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia). Her work considers rearrangement, oscillation, transmission and reciprocity in manifestations of writing, video, sculpture, sound, installation, printed matter, drawing and performance. Enduring interests include the use of personal narrative to interrupt dominant modes of understanding, representations of media and its effects/affects, natural movement, and the body as resistance. In 2011 Cassie graduated from NSCAD with a BFA in Intermedia. She has participated in the Visual Arts work-study program at the Banff Centre and subsequently attended the residency "In Kind" Negotiations in 2014. In 2022, they were awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant and a Nova Scotia Arts Grant for Individuals for their on-going art explorations of the metaverse. Cassie is presently based in London, Ontario and is pursuing their Master of Fine Arts at Western University. 

Dave Kemp is a new media artist interested in the intersections between art, science and technology: particularly how these fields shape our perception and understanding of the world. Kemp obtained his PhD in Art and Visual Culture from Western University and is a graduate from the Master of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto where he also completed the Collaborative Program in Knowledge Media Design. Prior to this, he earned an Image Arts (photography) BFA from Ryerson University, and his BScE in Mechanical Engineering at Queen’s University. He currently works as an Associate Professor in the Photography Media Arts program, in Image Arts at the Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly known as Ryerson University). 

Water | Remembering

September 24, 2025

Weldon Library Scholar's Lab

1 - 4 pm

Moving Images: Ozigwan (pictured above),and Into Water, Cole Forrest. On and On and On, Evelyn Pakinewatik, 2024. How to Steal a Canoe, Amanda Strong, 2016. 

Artmaking Activity: Silkscreening t-shirts with local artist Flourish and Grow. Watercolour painting. 

A pool of water acts as a mirror, and as we gaze down we might see the reflected memories of past histories. In Water | Remembering this series of short films explore how familial and ancestral bonds are cultivated with and through connection to the natural environment, specifically through water systems. The films expressly engage with Indigenous storytelling and world-building, forming new bonds by conversing with Lake Nipissing and other water systems.  

In Cole Forrest’s two films, Ozigwan (Tail of Serpent) (2023) and Into Water (2019), the Ojibwe filmmaker shot on location at Nipissing First Nation, embrace the history of Nbisiing Anishinaabeg people who have inhabited the lands near Lake Nipissing for ten thousand years. Ozigwan (Tail of Serpent) is a creative retelling of the Ojibwe-Aanishnaabe Stories of the Black Sturgeon which was told on Nipissing First Nation and is a vital part of the history of Lake Nipissing. Forrest’s film borrows from a 1970s horror flick aesthetic, a kind of Indigenous “creature feature” with a heartfelt story about a young man’s relations with his grandmother, as they fish together on Lake Nipissing. Forrest’s second film Into Water follows June, a water spirit, as they use ceremony to prepare for a return to the water there they were born. Both Ozigwan and Into Water, characters consider the ancestral relations with the Lake, it is an active agent, a provider, and a protector of human and animal life. 

In Evelyn Pakinewatik’s film On and On and On (2024) the Nbisiing Anishinaabe/Irish filmmaker records a interview with their mother and Mi'kmaq Elder Albert Ward. The recorded conversation is paired with scenic fragments filmed on the traditional ceremonial grounds of Nipissing First Nation. The conversation meanders and flows as Ward discusses various Happenings, reflecting on Indigenous knowledges of healing, survivance, the impacts of settler-colonialism and climate change. The circular nature of the conversation in On and On and On speaks to the poetics of repetition as an Indigenous epistemology, a means of relating to the cyclical dynamics that are at work in lifecycles and ecosystems.  

Amanda Strong’s How To Steal a Canoe (2016), featuring spoken lyrics by Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and an original score by Cree cellist Cris Derksen is an animation and a song that follows a young Nishnaabeg woman and old Nishnaabeg man who rescue a canoe from a museum to return it to a lake. The story narratively represents the repatriation of objects as an allegory for Indigenous sovereignty, of retaking what was theirs and returning it to its rightful place.  

Cole Forrest is an Ojibwe filmmaker and programmer from Nipissing First Nation. They have written and directed independent short films that have been screened at film festivals including imagineNATIVE, TQFF, and the Vancouver International Film Festival. Cole is a recipient of the Ken and Ann Watts Memorial Scholarship and of the James Bartleman Indigenous Youth Creative Writing Award. They were the 2019 recipient of the imagineNATIVE + LIFT Film Mentorship and a 2020 Artist in Residence as a part of the Sundance Native Filmmakers Lab. Cole has supported programming at festivals including TIFF, imagineNATIVE, and Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film. They are a graduate of the Video Design and Production program at George Brown College. Cole is currently writing their first feature film. They are grateful to represent their community in all artistic pursuits. 

Evelyn Pakinewatik (Nbisiing Anishinaabe/Irish, Nipissing First Nation) is a queer disabled filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist specializing in painting, printmaking, textile arts, and photography. Evelyn’s work explores the intersection of dreams and memory, and the societal distortion of interiority, relationality, and animacy. 

Evelyn is a 2018 Reelworld E20 Fellow, 2019 4th World Media Lab Fellow, a 2020 HotDocs Doc Accelerator Fellow, and a 2021 EFM Doc Salon Fellow. Evelyn’s films have been screened at various festivals including the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Māoriland Film Festival, Festival Présence Autochtone, and the Toronto Queer Film Festival. Their work has also been exhibited at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, Toronto City Hall, and the Bentway at Fort York. Evelyn has been invited to speak at higher learning institutions including the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Cornell University. Their most recent project is their narrative short film “Nooj Goji/Anywhere,” funded by the Indigenous Screen Office and the Canada Council for the Arts and set to begin its festival run later in 2024. 

Amanda Strong is an independent filmmaker, photographer, and illustrator. Amanda graduated from Sheridan Institute (B.A. Illustration 2009, Diploma Applied Photography 2005). Amanda is also the founder of Spotted Fawn Productions, finding creative solutions via media arts. Amanda's third short film, Honey for Sale, is a poetic exploration comparing the tenacious battle of the honeybee to her own fragility. This film, along with her other shorts, Riley and Alice Eaton, premiered at the imagineNATIVE Festival. Her 2014 short Indigo explores the imagination of an indigo child. 
 
Amanda is extremely active in her Aboriginal community, working with youth via media projects and workshops. The nature of her art and personality is uniquely diverse, allowing for positive collaborations. 
 
Amanda was the proud recipient of the 2009 LIFT and imagineNATIVE film mentorship. She is passionate and continues to pursue her dreams in filmmaking. 

Earth | Threads

October 7, 2025

Western Student Recreation Center

1 - 4 pm

Moving Images: solitary stitches: sand, snow, soil, Elham Fatapour, 2023. We Would be Freer, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, 2023 (pictured above). Kuenta, Jorge Lozano and Alexandra Gelis, 2012. 

Artmaking Activity: Collaborative weaving. 

Community is an essential component in this large-scale weaving activity where recycled and natural fibers are woven together as we collaborate to fill the loom. 

 When working with ones hands, we create new tactile relationships between our bodies, materials and the environment around us. Earth | Threads taps into how the rhythmic activities of sewing, weaving and foraging can be therapeutic practices that ground us. Earth | Threads is a series that pays tribute to the earthbound matter that shapes cultural knowledge. Films by Elham Fatapour and Jorge Lozano and Alexandra Gelis feature reaccuring durational actions, moments of quiet meditation, as a hand dances across the screen weaving thread through snow or winding string in a desert plain. Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s We Would be Freer (2023) reflects on the various healing properties of the sumac plant and its use by Indigenous people in occupied lands, both Turtle Island and the occupied West Bank in Palestine.  

Elham Fatapour’s solitary stitches: sand, snow, soil (2023) documents a land-based performance in which artist stitches and embroiders into the cracked earth and the snow. The video was filmed in the desert near the artist’s hometown in Iran and public spaces in Tkaronto. Juxtaposing scenes with scorching sand and snow, Fatapour’s film reflects the disorientation of immigration, with the act of stitching representing healing, resilience and connection. Tapping into these tactile activities as ritual, Fatapour considers craft to be a practice with a rich history connected to domesticity but also a tool of resistance. Through stitching, the artist draws lines into the earth in an act that speaks to the discreet relations between individuals and environments, but also may refer to the ways that borders abstract landscapes.  

In Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s We Would be Freer (2023) the filmmaker honours the relationships between native plants and those living under settler-colonialism. Two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, share with one another their experience with the Indigenous sumac plant and its cultural significance to Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island to Palestine. They discuss the maliability of sumac; how it can be used as a medicine, a dye or a powdered spice used in dishes such as the Palestinian musakham.  

Nazzal Hamadeh’s film from 2023 continues to be deeply poignant today. After two years of ongoing military warfare due to the Isreali-Hamas conflict, Palestinians in Gaza face heightening levels of food deprivation, leading to the mass starvation of civilians. As food deprivation is used in military warface and colonial occupation, the food sovereignty discussed in We Would be Freer the act of foraging and making do becomes a radical decolonial practice that centres community skillsharing and trade, it is a means of survival when access to food or medical aid is limited due to ongoing violence. The people of Palestine are connected through Indigenous plants, they each hold the history of the land, as they say, “the sumac tree shapes the soil of Palestine.” 

In Jorge Lozano and Alexandra Gelis’ film Kuenta (2012) the filmmakers recorded daily interventions that took place in La Guajira, in northern Colombia and northwest Venezuela. Exploring the Columbian and Venezuelan ancestral practice of weaving, the artists follow the Wayuu (people of the sun, sand and wind) in the Guajira Peninsula. The work could be documentation of a durational performance or alternatively a travel log, it is a decentered narrative in which thread is rhythmically wound and unwound, done and undone. The film reflects various material encounters with the land. The filmmakers seek to make visible all that exists beyond the landscape, simultaneously dedicating space to the delicate process of working with one’s hands as string blows in the wind, contrasted with mining infrastructure, plastics on a shoreline, and small moments where locals interact with their home.  

Elham Fatapour, born in Tehran, Iran, began her academic journey studying economics before shifting her focus to visual storytelling, autobiography, and social science. She later pursued illustration at Seneca College and transitioned into visual arts. Now based in Toronto, she holds an MFA in Visual Art from York University, where she received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Her multidisciplinary practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council, with exhibitions and residencies both locally and internationally. Her ongoing series Homemade Satellite Dishes won the 2022 Surveillance Studies Network Biennial Art Prize and was exhibited at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In 2023–2024, she was a Creative Producer for the Humber College Nuit Blanche Fellowship, mentoring artists and co-developing a featured exhibition. She is also a member of the Saloon Toronto network. 

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist currently based on Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework and using memory and story to engage intimately. Her practice is deeply informed by the knowledge emerging from grassroots movements for justice, both in occupied Palestine and across Turtle Island. Rana holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and is based between occupied Ramallah and Ottawa on unceded Anishinaabe territory. 

Jorge Lozano has been working as a film and video artist for the last 20 years and has achieved national and international recognition. His fiction films have been exhibited at the Toronto International Film Festival and at the Sundance Film Festival amongst others. His experimental work has been exhibited at many international festivals and galleries. He has expanded his practice to the organization of many cultural and art events, the creation of aluCine, Toronto Latin Media Festival, and facilitating self-representations video workshops for marginalized Latin and non-Latin youth in Canada since 1991, Colombia 2005-2009, and Venezuela 2005. 

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan-Canadian media artist, curator and researcher. Her practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary, including film, photography, drawing, and new media installation with custom-built interactive electronics and sound. 
She is known for single-screen film works and modular immersive non-fiction-based installations. Her projects incorporate personal field research as a tool to investigate the ecologies of various landscapes by examining the traces left by various socio-political interventions. 

She has exhibited internationally in North and South America, including the Walker Art Center, Europe and Africa. 

Earth | Conjuring

October 29, 2025

Schmeichel Building

1 - 4 pm

Moving Images: Witch's Work, Emily Pelstring, 2018. Sistership TV Episode 1: Gotta Crack a Few Eggs, the Powers featuring FASTWÜRMS and Blevin Blectum, 2019. Medicine and Magic, Theo J. Cuthand, 2020. Concrete Shape (pictured above), Jesi Jordan, 2023. H1BA- Curses, Hiba Ali, 2019. 

Artmaking Activity: Seed paper zines. 

Wildflower seed paper is transformed into artist zines or journals with this waxed-thread binding workshop. The seed paper booklets can then be planted in the ground to support growth, healing, and change. 

The Earth|Conjuring program coalescences around themes of mysticism; the witchy, wacky and magical. Drawing from pagan traditions of human-animal-land cominglings, Indigenous epistemologies and ancestral material exchanges, our program explores various forms of earth magic. In Earth|Conjuring an animation flickers like a candle in the dark, videos cast spells and a variety show conducts inter-dimensional travel. Through witchery and play our series taps into the sometimes intangible or mysterious relationships between individuals, the earth and animals, as beings and matter respond to one another in a complex ecosystem. Earth|Conjuring is a celebration of symbiotic divination, or, the magical connectedness of all living beings. 

Emily Pelstring’s 2018 animation Witch’s Work is a collection of three tales inspired by the Greek myths attributed to the diving eye of Graeae, a trio of three sisters, with each story representing a life-death cycle. A water goddess emerges, giving birth to an owl, a crystal and a glowing orb. These forms melt into a young ghost dancing in the ether, morphing into a snake. The animation features a scientist wrestling with their computer, a hand offering an egg holding a flickering soul, and Medusa laughing in the darkness. In Pelstring’s animation work one form transforms into another, exploring how cinema relies on the interplay between spaces, bodies and technologies.  

Our next video-work is an episode of the SistershipTV variety show, Gotta Crack a Few Eggs (2019) produced by the art collective The Powers, featuring guest performances by artist bio FASTWÜRMS and electronic musician Blevin Blectum. In their pilot episode The Powers commune with animals, spirits and machines, finding an enchanted Egg in the forest, conducting a seance through a TV screen and travelling across dimensions on the back of a cockatoo. The Powers introduce a lexicon of symbols and characters: three Sister-Crones perform a techno dance between vignettes, the skel-o-phone crimes and a hypnotic black cat circles the viewer. In SistershipTV, The Powers take their audience on a journey to uncover the bonds between humans, technologies, animals and the Earth.  

Theo J. Cuthand’s Medicine and Magic (2020) reflects on the artist’s familial connection to spiritual, magical and medicinal forces. Cuthand navigates their experiences being raised with Plains Cree stories of medicine men, such as, the protective force of bear spirits, and investigates their Scottish genealogy in relation to the persecution of witches. The artist draws connections between these two familial histories tied to magic and medicine across different cultures, parsing through how both are stories of hope, discovery and colonial control.  

In Jesi Jordan’s Concrete Shape (2023) the artist responds to the natural environment surrounding the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. Using special effects and editing, the film depicts the body mutating into sculptural figures constructed of organic matter: Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, cactus husks, chicken eggs, and water. The artist refers to their process as an animation of earth electronics, the artist uses the earth’s matter and video to depict the symbiosis between living beings and the land. Jordan’s works are feminist interventions in the landscape, inspired by their nomadic lifestyle, their site-specific films are described by the artist as “fever-dream travelogues.” 

Hiba Ali’s H1BA – Curses (2019) explores processes of healing as an ongoing cyclical experience of being in time. Ali dances in the foreground of the frame, animating the “indigo of their ancestors” to expel inter-generational curses. In the film, the artist in turn “curses,” symbols of an oppression military-industrial complex, calling up powers of healing to destroy military tanks, drones and money. The film, featuring a catchy soundtrack and dance, is reminiscent to a music video in structure, using irony and symbolism to conspicuously resist colonial logics of occupation and control.  

Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her work across media installation, experimental film, and performance situates the moving image and sound in relation to overlapping concepts drawn from science, magical traditions, and religious texts. Her artistic inquiries bring together questions around the contingency of the cinematic spectacle: the interdependence of space, bodies, electricity, apparatus, and cultural perceptions. Her projects have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, and exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, DIY spaces, and festivals. Emily is engaged in ongoing artistic collaborations with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline, her “sister-crones” in the trio The Powers, and was a core organizer of an international symposium called The Witch Institute, which brought together scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore the figure of the witch in art and media. 

The Powers is at once a band, an artistic collaboration, and a research group committed to weaving alternate realities through video, music, story-telling, dance, and ritualistic performance. The Powers create a speculative reality that is absurd, irreverent and terrifying, inhabited by animal kin and monstrous creatures, haunted by other-dimensional entities, and erupting with the repressed archetypes of classical myth. In this world, The Powers foster dynamic relationships with all sorts of beings--earthly, embodied, and otherwise. They invoke a pantheon of characters and deities, and include them in feminist reconfigurations of hetero-patriarchal myths. They draw inspiration from mythological trinities of sisters such as the Graeae, the Gorgons, and the Fates, and recast these icons in reclaimative, chaotic media events. 

Theo Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 he has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Ann Arbour Film Festival, Images in Toronto, Berlinale in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Outfest in Los Angeles USA, and the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück Germany. His work has also exhibited at galleries including the Remai in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, MoMA in New York, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and his Masters of Arts in Media Production at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2015. He has made commissioned work for Urban Shaman and Videopool in Winnipeg, Cinema Politica in Montreal, VIMAF in Vancouver, and Bawaadan Collective in Canada. In 2020 he completed working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on his experience learning and dealing with his bipolar disorder. In 2023 he completed his second video game, Carmilla the Lonely. He has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 he won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. He is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. He has made 38 films and videos and is working on a video game called Repatriate Me. Currently he has two feature films in development. He is a trans man who uses He/Him pronouns. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.  

Jesi Jordan is a self-taught animator and performer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her work is full of chimeric landforms, melting bodies, radical womanhood, sentient objects, and disarming ruptures of time and space. Inspired by her nomadic lifestyle, Jesi's animated short films, music videos and performances are a fever-dream travelogue. Her animations are diaries of her most traversed landscape: that of her own vivid imagination. 

Hiba Ali is a new media artist, writer, DJ, experimental music producer and curator based across Chicago, IL, Austin, TX, and Toronto, ON. Her performances and videos concern music, labour and power. She conducts reading groups addressing digital media and workshops with open-source technology. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University, Kingston, Canada. She has presented her work in Chicago, Stockholm, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland. She has written for THE SEEN Magazine, Newcity Chicago, Art Dubai, The State, VAM Magazine, ZORA: Medium, RTV Magazine, and Topical Cream Magazine. 

Wind | Sound

November 12, 2025

Thames Hall Atrium

1 - 4 pm

Artmaking Activity: Wind chimes. 

More program details coming soon!

Fire | Futures

December 4, 2025

Western Student Recreation Center

1 - 4 pm

Moving Images: The Golden Chain, Adebukola Bodunrin and Ezra Claytan Daniels, 2016. The Peacemaker Returns, Skawennati, 2018. SuperNova, Rah Eleh, 2019. A Proposal for Anti-Drone Architecture: Shura City, Hiba Ali, 2013.

Artmaking Activity: Stained Glass Tealight Holders. 

A twist on the classic tealight jar where the glass is painted into an illusionary stained-glass glow. The first 100 guests will receive a beeswax tealight to take home. 

In our next program we engage with fire as a metaphor for transformation, hope and the illuminating glow of imagining futures. The program features films that draw from science fiction and fantasy, Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism to dream new worlds of survivance and transformation in the face of environmental devastation. Through these films the artists ask us to dream our own futures, and this simple act of imagining a way forward, as the present moment can spur feelings of hopelessness, becomes a revelatory act of de-colonial world building.  

Our first film, The Golden Chain, is an Afrofuturist animation by Adebukola Bodunrin and Ezra Claytan Daniels. In this short film the Nigerian space station Eko orbits an artificial pinpoint of matter that is so dense that it cannot exist in our solar system. Revisiting the Yoruba creation tale, Bodunrin and Claytan Daniels chronicle a journey of curiosity as Yetunde, a sole researcher stationed on Eko, discovers the beginning of the universe. The film blends science fiction with traditional West African motifs, to ponder the past and futures of the Yoruba.  

Set in 3025, artist Skawennati’s The Peacemaker Returns retells the ancestral Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederation story through a futurist lens. In ancient Iroquoia tradition, the Peacemaker brought peace to the warring nations of the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Cayuga and the Seneca. In the film, these pillars of reciprocity have been recognized globally and the Earth has become a confederation of countries who are unified in the preservation of a shared planet. This machinima animation, which is movie created using video recordings from a virtual environment, imagines how ancestral Iroquois knowledge of peacemaking can allow for a respectful co-existence of peoples and other-wordly beings.  

Rah Eleh’s film SuperNova is an ethnifuturist game show parody. The artist Eleh dons various elaborate costumes to play seven distinct characters, who are each participating in a space-age clone of an American Idol-style reality show. In the film, contestants perform for a vast audience of inhuman figures, with bulging eyes and lilting bodies, with their talents assessed by a row of judges. SuperNova, within the structure of the game show, creates an ethnifuturist aesthetic combining historical markers of identity with science fiction world-building. 

In A Proposal for Anti-Drone Architecture: Shura City, artist Hiba Ali collaborated with Asher Kohn and 유+웃 CHAiT, in the creation of this animated film that dreams of a city infrastructure designed to prohibit the use of drones. Their work is a response to the unethical use of drones in warfare and imperialism, and the unlawful surveillance that is often enabled by these technologies. Dreaming a future of collective action, within Shura City citizens are freed from an oppressive city-state model. This work of futurist film allows viewers to think through the necessity of privacy to form societies that prioritize autonomy and self-determination for all people.  

Adebukola Bodunrin is a Nigerian-Canadian film, & video artist who explores language, culture, and media. In her collage animations, she manipulates film using unorthodox manual and digital techniques to produce unexpected cinematic experiences. Bodunrin’s animation work has been featured on the television series Transparent, and in KCET’s “Lost LA” series, for which she also won an LA Area Emmy award for segment direction. 

Ezra Claytan Daniels is a mixed-race American (black/white) multidisciplinary artist and creator of the award-winning graphic novels, Upgrade Soul and BTTM FDRS. Ezra currently resides in Los Angeles, where he writes for film and television, including Doom Patrol, for HBO Max, and Horror Noire, for Shudder. 
 
Ezra and Buki’s first collaborative work, the animated Afrofuturist short film, The Golden Chain, has screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, Redcat Theater, Museum of Contemporary Arts Chicago, Festival Animator, Black Cinema House, and on the Criterion Channel. In 2017, The Golden Chain was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art for their permanent collection. 

Skawennati is a visual artist. Her machinimas and machinimagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others. 

Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run center. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network at Concordia University. Originally from Kahnawà:ke, Skawennati resides in Montreal. 

Rah Eleh is an Iranian-Canadian video, photo and performance artist. Her work has been published and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including Williams College Museum of Art (Massachusetts), Cutlog Contemporary Art Fair (New York), Kunsthaus Graz Museum (Austria), Onassis Cultural Centre (Greece) and Cable Factory (Finland). 
 
Rah has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including: SSHRC (Canada, 2016), Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Conseil Des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec Grant for Film (2015) and Digital Arts (2014), Studio Das Weisse Haus Residency (Vienna, 2014), Artslant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris, 2014), Ottawa Art Gallery Award of Excellence (2013)  and the SAW Video Award (Canada, 2012). 

Hiba Ali is a new media artist, writer, DJ, experimental music producer and curator based across Chicago, IL, Austin, TX, and Toronto, ON. Her performances and videos concern music, labour and power. She conducts reading groups addressing digital media and workshops with open-source technology. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University, Kingston, Canada. She has presented her work in Chicago, Stockholm, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland. She has written for THE SEEN Magazine, Newcity Chicago, Art Dubai, The State, VAM Magazine, ZORA: Medium, RTV Magazine, and Topical Cream Magazine. 

Fire | Futures

December 4, 2025

McIntosh Gallery

5 - 7 pm

Moving Images: A Confluence of Legacies, performance by the Michelle Wilson and the Coves Collective, 2025 (performance from 2024 pictured above). Program of short films presented in partnership with the Small File Media Festival: Another Another World, Matthias Grotkopp (2023). Liquid Snake Dance Ioannis Karalis (2024). Walking Through a Nile Codex Mena El Shazly and Omnia Sabry (2021). ici loin / here afar Ghada Sayegh (2024). Glints; a temple; a white wall; a ravine; a strong wind Somayeh Khakshoor (2021), Night Tender Dag Davidge and Bernice Chau (2023).   

Artmaking Activity: Stereoscope Reel.

View, alter, create, and modify vintage view-master reels into new works of art and hanging ornaments that interact with light.  

Fire | Moving Light is a full circle celebration of the possibilities of the moving image, exploring the flux of video and stretching its capacities by incorporating live music, improvisation and glitches. A Confluence of Legacies, a video and live performance by Michelle Wilson and the Cove Collective, is a speculative fiction work combining overhead projector animation, narration, and a live score. Following this performance, join us for a screening of low bandwidth eco-media films, presented in partnership with the Small File Media Festival. Across Fire | Moving Light, artists pay homage to the warm glow of the moving image, with its unique ability to connect us. 

In A Confluence of Legacies (2025) intermedia artist Michelle Wilson presents a live performance composed of an overhead projector animation, narration, and a live score to explore how personal, familial, historical, and more-than-human legacies converge around an abandoned paint factory site within an Environmentally Significant Area known as The Coves, located in London, Ontario. This piece continues Wilson's collaboration with the Coves Collective, which is partially funded by the London Arts Council's Community Arts Investment Program. The Coves Collective is an ad-hoc group of artists, educators, and activists who have come together to attend to our responsibilities and relationships with the Coves. The Coves Collective is founded on an ethos of direct action, accessibility, collaboration, and justice. 

The Coves in London has a very complex ecological history; it is now a rich biodiverse habitat, but in 1939 the Almatex Paint Factory was built on the land, leading to decades of toxic chemical emissions affecting the land and water in the area. The Coves Collective think through this complex history of place through educational work, activism, and different art events, exhibitions and happenings, showing how the Coves is a beloved natural space for community, a biodiverse habitat, and a site of environmental degradation. We have invited the Coves Collective to perform a second iteration of their performance which depicts a parafictive story of the Coves as a place, Combining fact and fiction, the narrator chronicles union organizing that took place at the factory, as well as, the wildlife and plantlife that flourish to this day.  

Following Michelle Wilson and the Cove Collective’s performance, please join us for a screening of short form films presented in partnership with the Small File Media Festival.  

Our final screening features an international collection of filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of low-data film, developing their own aesthetic language through pixels, data-moshing, distortion and colour manipulation. Films by Mena El Shazly and Omnia Sabry address how film can be used in meaning-making, as images and colours are juxtaposed to build a distinct narrative through association while the works of Somayeh Khakshoor, Ioannis Karalis, Dag Davidge and Bernice Chau and Ghada Sayegh exhibit the potentials of digital disintegration to represent the temporality of film.  

The Small File Media Festival’s primary mandate is to promote slower and more conscious use of digital technologies “within limits,” including the computers and platforms we require to access video and film. The environmental impacts associated with the rapid demand for high resolution streaming video are extensive and ever increasing, attributed primarily to excessive energy use and a proliferation of electronic waste. The SFMF counters the mainstream excess of video streaming by only screening films that falls under a compressed rate of 1.44MB per minute. Transforming the films into Small-File Ecomedia, the SFMF inspires filmmakers to create provoking and thoughtful films within energy-responsive parameters. By partnering with SFMF to screen this program of low data eco-films we hope to share with our audiences new ways of accessing video while being conscious of how the digital technologies we use to experience moving images have material impacts on the Earth.