Sharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her practice engages with translation, history, and sound to uncover sensory and fractured ways of understanding the relationship between the self and the social in transnational contexts.

I’m George Elliott Clarke: a poet first – all else second.

      By my roots – African-American, Indigenous, Nova Scotian/Africadian, Afro-Metis – I’m nourished, but not entangled; and I’m a citizen of the world, in imagination, if not in fact. I earn my daily bread as a professor and writer, but I’ve also worked as a library activities programmer; computerized traffic signals controller; parliamentary researcher; student newspaper editor; community newspaper editor; social worker; parliamentary aide; and, of course, as a professor, first at Duke University and now at the University of Toronto, but with guest gigs at McGill, UBC, and Harvard. As a scholar, I’ve pioneered the study of African-Canadian literature; as a writer, I’ve brought “Blackened English” to poetry, drama, and fiction. And I’ve coined the term, “Africadian.”

      Welcome to my site, my insights. I hope you’ll find it an incitement….

Sameer Farooq is a Canadian artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. His interdisciplinary practice investigates tactics of representation and enlists the tools of sculpture, 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. With exhibitions at institutions around the world including the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The British Library (London), the Institute of Islamic Culture (Paris), Vicki Myhren Gallery (Denver), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Maquis Projects, (Izmir), Trankat (Tétouan, Morocco), Sol Koffler Gallery (Providence), Artellewa (Cairo), and Sanat Limani (Istanbul), Farooq received several awards from The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, and the Europe Media Fund, as well the President’s Scholarship at the Rhode Island School of Design. Reviews and essays dedicated to his work have been included in C Magazine, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, Artnet, The Huffington Post, Canadian Art, and others. He also appeared on the 2018 Sobey Art Award long list, Canada’s preeminent art award.

Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist and activist based in London, Ontario. Since the 1970’s, she has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. She is also active as a lecturer, writer and independent curator and has travelled and worked within Canada and internationally. In 2001 she was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts. In 1993 she received the “Canada 125 ” Medal for outstanding community service.

Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. He works in performance, media, sculpture and drawing. His practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

Nahed currently serves as Ontario Arts Council’s new Visual Arts Officer.

Nahed has over 15 years of experience as an artist, curator, and arts manager, working in community-based festivals (Mayworks Festival), artist-run centres (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), and public art museums (Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Gardiner Museum, and Royal Ontario Museum).  She is recognized for connecting socially engaged BIPOC artists and communities with arts spaces of different scales. She has a strong record of designing inclusive and accessible programs that advance community collaborations, arts education, and artistic practice from an equity-informed perspective and anti-racist framework. Her independent curatorial practice centers work by visual, media, and community-based artists whose work respond to contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental issues from racialized and gendered perspectives.

Nadia Myre (born 1974) is a contemporary visual artist from Montreal Quebec and an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, who lives and works in Montreal. For over a decade, her multi-disciplinary practice has been inspired by participant involvement as well as recurring themes of identity, language, and longing. and loss. Of the artist, Canadian Art Magazine writes, “Nadia Myre’s work weaves together complex histories of Aboriginal identity, nationhood, memory and handicraft, using beadwork techniques to craft exquisite and laborious works.” Through her body of work, Myre is interested in having conversations about collective identity, resilience and the politics of belonging.

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator. His work is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Throughout the past decade, he has focused on a critical re-reading of the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. These concerns derive from lived experiences: Petros is an Eritrean emigrant who spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in central Canada. The overlapping cultures, voices, and tenets of this constellation produced a dispersed consciousness, global and transnational in stance and outlook. His works aim for an introspective and textured analysis of the historical factors that produced these migratory conditions. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound work according to performative, painterly, or site responsive logics. Moving between the works echoes the extensive travel taken to produce them; while recurrent visual or formal devices quietly indicate the complex backdrops against which his projects are set.

Nep Sidhu is an interdisciplinary practitioner who works through the metaphysics of form and spatial rhythm within the context of community and self-expression. Through material investigations of textile, sculpture, painting, video, and sound, Sidhu’s work seeks symbolic pathways that help to realize the formlessness of the divine through endless possibility and search. Sidhu participated in exhibitions with the Nagoya City Museum, Japan Aichi Triennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; Esker Foundation, Calgary; Heard Museum, Phoenix; Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; and The Frye Museum of Art, Seattle; Glasgow International, Scotland. Most recently Nep Sidhu was featured in his first solo U.S. museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Jaret Vadera’s work explores the ways that images, ideologies, and technologies colonize our vision. Vadera hacks different visual systems, and rewires them to glitch, rupture, and open up parallel ways of seeing. His work is influenced by decolonial theory, science fiction, and impossible objects.