2023

Aseel AlYaqoub's research-based and interdisciplinary practice ranges from drawing and printmaking to video, sculpture and installation. Various visual languages characterise her work, which is defined by her inquisitorial and academic approach that travels across the fields of history, architecture, and cultural sociology. Her explorations revolve around the inherited methodologies used for nation-building, the role of state apparatuses in defining nationhood, and the nation's processes for self-identification after imperial dissolution and reattachment.

She has participated in exhibitions worldwide, including Stories We Tell Ourselves, Foreman Gallery, Quebec (2021), Emotionally Confronted Through Distance, Art Claims Impulse, Berlin (2021), From Visionaries to Vloggers, The Media Majlis at Northwestern University, Doha (2020), 24th Biennial of Humor and Satire, The Museum of Humor and Satire, Gabrovo (2018), Signs of Life: in and out of time and space, Boiler Room/Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn (2015), Out of Kuwait, Edge of Arabia, London (2013). In Kuwait, she exhibits at The Sultan Gallery, Contemporary Art Platform, the Museum of Modern Art and Gallery BAWA.

AlYaqoub was a curator alongside Yousef Awaad, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati and Asaiel Al Saeed for the Kuwait Pavilion, 17th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia (Space Wars, 2021) and won the first Art Jameel Commission in collaboration with Alia Farid (Contrary Life, 2018). In addition, she was shortlisted with the design firm Studio Toggle for an architectural competition led by the Royal Commissioners of AlUla (Khat, 2019) and for the Blooom Award by Warsteiner (2016). AlYaqoub's work can be found in permanent collections, including the Barjeel Art Foundation and Jameel Art Collection..

The interdisciplinary practice of Sameer Farooq & Mirjam Linschooten aims to create community-based models of participation and knowledge production in order to re-imagine a material record of the present. They investigate tactics of representation and enlist the tools of installation, photography, documentary filmmaking, writing, and the methods of anthropology to explore various forms of collecting, interpreting, and display. The result is often a collaborative work which counterbalances how dominant institutions speak about our lives: a counter-archive, new additions to a museum collection, or a buried history made visible. Their work has been exhibited in various countries, including: Belgium, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey. Recent projects include Faux Guide (Trankat, Morocco), The Museum of Found Objects Toronto (Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada), The Museum of Found Objects Istanbul (Turkish Ministry of Culture, Turkey), Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue (Artellewa, Egypt).

Sameer Farooq has been awarded several grants from the Canada Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, and the Europe Media Fund as well the President’s Scholarship at the Rhode Island School of Design. He grew up in Canada, studying at McGill University (CAN), the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (NL), and completed his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (US).

Mirjam Linschooten was named a Fulbright Scholar and was a recipient of the Mondriaan Fund international grant, as well as the European Culture Fund grant. Mirjam grew up the Netherlands where she completed her Bachelor in Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (NL).

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn is a visual artist using archives and a broad range of media including, but not exclusively, photography, film, video, sound and printmaking to investigate issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics and multiculturalism via feminist theories. Currently based in Stockholm, she is a PhD candidate in the ‘Art, Technology and Design’ program at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Nguyễn previously completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 2011, having obtained her MFA and a post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy in 2005, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2021); Borås Art Biennial, Borås (2021); Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2019); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2018); Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Philadelphia (2018); MAMA, Rotterdam (2018); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2017); EFA Project Space, New York City (2016); Mercer Union, Toronto (2015).

Emii Alrai is an artist and sometimes writer whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Alrai's work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which start with archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in social memory, oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language, the practice questions the rigidity of Empire, the power of hierarchy and interpolates the static presence of history.

Shuvinai Ashoona began to draw in the early 1990s. Although never formally trained, Ashoona’s family and the Kinngait Studios in Cape Dorset have provided her with a creative atmosphere. Her family includes important artists like her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona, her sculptor father Kiawak Ashoona, and her graphic artist cousin Annie Pootoogook.

Ashoona's recent major solo exhibition, Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds was held at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in 2019, and toured to multiple venues. Her work has been exhibited alongside that of Sobey Art Award winner Annie Pootoogook, and Shary Boyle, who represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2013. At the Toronto International Art Fair (Art Toronto), the Art Gallery of Ontario purchased her drawings Shoveling Worlds and Cape Dorset From Above for their permanent collection, in 2013 and 2014 respectively.Most recently, Ashoona's work was chosen to be a part of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Her work was also included bb11 – The 11^th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2020, and the Manif d’art, the Quebec City Biennial, which ran from February – April 2019. She has also been awarded the 2018 Gershon Iskowitz prize for remarkable achievements in the Canadian visual arts. Other major international exhibitions include City Sky (2008) in Basel, Switzerland; the Sydney Biennale (2012); the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s major exhibition O, Canada (2012); and SITElines Santa Fe: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas (2014-2015).  She is a leading contemporary Canadian artist and is in numerous collections of major art institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the BMO Financial Group, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Canadian Museum of History, the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Guelph, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the TD Bank Group, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

BUSH Gallery (Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, Tania Willard) is a space for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art mediums might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. This model of decolonial, non-institutional ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous creative production is at the heart of BUSH Gallery. BUSH Gallery is a trans-conceptual gallery space. To be trans-conceptual is to reposition ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. A trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux – never settling, like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices which are born out of a lived connection to the land.

This gallery is out on the land, it is outside of or at the margins of monetary systems and away from the colonized space of art institutions. This gallery is a gallery of the land, of Indigenous culture(s) and language(s); this gallery can show new media with basketry, beading with installation art, performance art and storytelling. BUSH gallery is located on sovereign Secwépemc Territory. BUSH Gallery is Tania Willard's home, and participation comes with invitation.

Bettina Forget is an artist and educator based in Montreal, Canada, and the Director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Artist-in-Residence program located in Mountain View, California. In this capacity she facilitates the collaboration between artists and SETI researchers, foregrounds art-science research practice, and weaves a network of institutional partners active in art, science, and technology.

Her creative practice and academic research examine the re-contextualization of art and science, and how transdisciplinary education may disrupt gender stereotypes. Bettina works with traditional as well as new media arts, focusing on astrobiology, sci-fi, and feminism. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University, Canada where her project “Imagine Aliens” is supported by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Fellowship and the Renata and Michal Hornstein Doctoral Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited internationally including ISEA (Barcelona), CYFEST-13 (Saint Petersburg), and the Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan (Montreal). 

Nancy Jo Cullen’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Ex-Puritan, The Humber Literary Review, Event Magazine, Grain, filling Station, Plenitude, Prairie Fire, Arc, This Magazine, Room, The Journey Prize, Best Canadian Fiction 2012, Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2024. She is the 2010 recipient for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. Her most recent collection of poetry, Nothing Will Save Your Life, was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2022. She has published three collections of poetry with Frontenac House and a collection of short stories, Canary, with Biblioasis. Her first novel, The Western Alienation Merit Badge, was short-listed for the 2020 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. She is currently working on her second novel and a prose-poetry project. 

Janet Jones was born in Montréal, Québec. BFA, Concordia University, painting & photography; MFA York University; PhD New York University, art theory and criticism. Jones’ work has been exhibited across Canada, in LA, New York, England, Germany, France and China. Recent projects: Gathering Fictions: A Dialogue on Painting, a two-person exhibition, Varley Art Gallery, 2022 with catalogue, 2023.  Montréal Painting Biennale 2020 with a  solo exhibition Ghost Town; the solo exhibition The Dream Machine, Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montréal (2018); solo exhibitions, Playtimes (2015) and Joyride (2012) Katzman Contemporary Toronto; a national touring exhibition,  DaDa Delirium, with an accompanying catalogue (2011);  participation in the Empire of Dreams exhibition, MOCCA 2010. Jones has been a visiting artist in Germany, France, England, Russia, China, the Netherlands, and Cuba, notably at The Bauhaus, Weimar, Germany; Slade School of Art, London, Muchina Art Institute, St Petersburg, Russia; The Moscow Artists’ Union, & Central Academy of Art, Beijing.  Winter /Spring 2023 she was an Artist in Residence at ISCP – NYC, through Senior Research/Creation & International Residency Canada Council Grants. Janet Jones is a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, & Art History, York University. She is represented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montréal. 

Nurielle Stern is a Toronto-based sculpture and installation artist and a graduate of Alfred University’s MFA program in Ceramic Art (2014). Her large-scale installation, Fable, was commissioned by the Gardiner Museum in 2019.  She was the 2019 recipient of the Winifred Shantz Award, and a 2020 recipient of the NCECA Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her work is held in several public collections including the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, ON, and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo, ON.

Recent exhibitions include the fully collaborative exhibition, Whale Fall, with artist Nicholas Crombach (Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, 2019; Queen’s University’s Union Gallery, Kingston, ON, 2021). Stern and Crombach’s two person exhibition, Petrichor, was mounted at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, ON in 2023. Stern’s collaborative work with poet and fiction writer Nancy Jo Cullen was created with a grant from the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (2009-11).

Stern’s use of ceramic materials evokes an archeological imaginary. Combining ceramics with video and other media, her work navigates the malleability of language and materials, and the dialectics of inside and outside—the tamed and the wilderness. 

Jesse Tungilik is an interdisciplinary artist based in Iqaluit, NU. He has worked in many artistic disciplines, starting as a ceramic sculptor at the Matchbox Gallery in Kangiqliniq (Rankin Inlet), NU, (beginning at just eight years old, and continuing into adulthood) before working in Mathew Nuqingaq’s Aayuraa Studio in Iqaluit, NU, as a jewellery artist specializing in baleen, muskox horn, ivory and silver. Tungilik also works in mixed-media sculpture, with pieces exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Nuit Blanche Montreal, the Nunavut Arts Festival, the Great Northern Arts Festival, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, among others. His work can be found in both public and private collections nationally and internationally, including the CIRNAC Indigenous Arts Collection in Ottawa, and Museum Cerny Inuit Collection in Bern, Switzerland.

Tungilik has served as both a Manager of Cultural Industries for the Government of Nunavut and as the Executive Director of the Nunavut Art and Craft Association as well as the Chairperson for the Board of Trustees for the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum in Iqaluit, NU, and is a member of the Inuit governance group of the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership SSHRC Partnership Grant (2018–2025). He is currently a Social and Cultural Policy Analyst at Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated. 

Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections including: National Gallery of Canada, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, The Wedge Collection and The Rooms. 

Brandon Vickerd is a Hamilton based artist and Professor of Sculpture at York University, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts and Art History. He received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1999) and his MFA from the University of Victoria (2001).  

Purposely diverse, his studio work straddles the line between high and low culture, acting as a catalyst for critical thought and addressing the failed promise of a modernist future predicated on boundless scientific advancement. Whether through craftsmanship, the creation of spectacle, or humor, the goal of his work is to provoke the viewer into questioning the dominate myth of progress ingrained in Western world views.  

Vickerd has received numerous awards and grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

The York University Nanosatellite Research Lab is part of the Earth and Space Science and Engineering (ESSE) department at York University. Led by Professor Regina Lee, a strong advocate for gender equality and diverse systems of knowledge in the engineering fields, the group’s research centres on next generation satellite technologies for Space Situational Awareness (SSA), and microphotonic payloads for small satellites. Increasingly, her work has taken the lab towards innovative scientific presentations and community science communication activities including talks at the Ontario Science Centre as well as creative work around the CSA Stratos balloon launch in Timmins August 2023 that is featured in this exhibition.  Since 2021, the lab has been working with faculty and students from the School of the Arts, Media Performance and Design on maximizing interdisciplinary expertise.  Regina is co-PI on a SSHRC NFRF-E with Professor Joel Ong entitled “Space Situational Awareness and Us”.