Artists

Babak Golkar is a conceptual artist whose practice critically examines the instability of meaning, value, and agency within contemporary socio-political and economic structures. Through sculpture, installation, and video, his work resists passive spectatorship, instead positioning the audience as active participants embedded within constructed systems. Rather than eliciting interpretations of what an artwork means, Golkar’s practice compels engagement with what it does, generating visceral or imagined visceral experiences that reveal the contradictions inherent in mechanisms of power, perception, and control. By employing strategies of deconstruction, recontextualization, and participatory frameworks, he disrupts familiar structures of engagement, compelling viewers to confront the instability of their own position within these systems. Rooted in an interrogation of agency, complicity and resistance, his practice engages with the conditions that shape public engagement, institutional authority and political discourse, complicating dominant narratives rather than presenting fixed conclusions.

Born in the United States, raised in Iran, and later immigrating to Canada, Golkar’s transnational background informs his critical interrogation of spatial, cultural, and ideological frameworks. By activating the audience as both subject and participant, his work engages with broader discourses surrounding performativity, embodiment, and systemic critique. Golkar’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Vancouver Art Gallery; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Fondation Boghossian – Villa Empain, Brussels; The British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where he received a Jameel Fellowship in 2022. Through ongoing research and material experimentation, he continues to investigate the limits of perception and participation, critically examining the constructed mechanisms that mediate individual and collective engagement with spatial, socio-political, and ideological structures.

Mona Filip is a contemporary art curator and writer based in Toronto. Originally from Bucharest, where she began her artistic education, Filip received her BFA from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, and her MFA from SUNY at Buffalo. Most recently as Curator at the Art Museum of the University of Toronto and previously Director/Curator of the Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Filip’s curatorial practice spans almost two decades and over forty exhibitions and sitespecific projects, collaborations with guest curators, a broad range of public programs, and innovative educational initiatives. With an idea-driven and dialogue-focused approach, she collaborates with artists to produce experiential and immersive installations that transform the familiar gallery space, meaningfully respond to unconventional sites, and engage the public on sensorial, emotional, and intellectual levels. She developed first public gallery shows in Toronto of prominent Canadian artists such as Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Sameer Farooq, Karen Tam, and José Luis Torres, and first Canadian exhibitions of acclaimed international artists Raphaël Zarka (France) and Christian Hidaka (UK), Sigalit Landau (Israel), Esther Shalev-Gerz (France), Isabel Rocamora (UK/ Spain), Iara Freiberg (Brazil/ Argentina), and Joshua Neustein (USA).

Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Québec. She studied Sociology and Communication at the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada before pursuing a career in visual arts and film. Her work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, New York City; Toronto Biennal of Art; KØS Museum, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Montréal; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Solo exhibitions include Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Arsenal Contemporary, New York City; and Centre d’art international de Vassivière, France. Her work is included in numerous collections in North America as well as the permanent UNESCO collection in Paris. Her films have been extensively programmed at international film festivals including TIFF and Sundance. In 2016, she was selected for the Cannes Festival Cinéfondation residency in Paris. Monnet is recipient of the 2020 Pierre-Ayot award and the Merata Mita Fellowship of the Sundance Institute, and she was recently named Compagne des arts et des lettres du Québec. She is based in Montréal and is represented by Blouin-Division Gallery.

Megan Feniak (b. 1990, Edmonton) is a multidisciplinary artist whose sculptures are rooted in traditional wood carving and folk art forms. Through intimate, tactile processes and accumulative mark-making, her works explore desire, faith, and primordial relationships. Feniak earned her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts, Edmonton, and her MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; Stride Gallery, Calgary; Hunt Gallery, Toronto; The Plumb, Toronto; Left Contemporary, Windsor; Support, London; and The Bows, Calgary. She has participated in artist residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Badlands Art Department in Drumheller. Feniak is currently based in Banff, Alberta, on Treaty 7 territory.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Milky Way-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. Collaborating with characters in search of consciousness, language, and freedom, her recent body of work explores the aesthetic, political, epistemological possibilities of image and sound. Her work has been presented in both the art and cinema context, including Belvedere 21, Vienna; Centro di Musica Contemporanea di Milano, Milan; De Appel, Amsterdam; Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, New York; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Los Angeles; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden; Villa Medici, Rome; Whitechapel Gallery, London; 12th Berlin Biennale; 20th Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival; 60th New York Film Festival; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2023/24; 20th Reykjavík International Film Festival; 33rd Singapore International Film Festival; among other spaces. In 2023, she was included among the 20 New Talents in Art in America, nominated for the New:Vision Award (1), and awarded the Jury Grand Prix (2) and Golden Lola (3) for Into The Violet Belly. Having studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is currently a PhD researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media, the University of Westminster and a fellow at the Junge Akademie, the Academy of Arts.

(1) The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

(2) The 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival.

(3) The German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Hangama Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences. Her recent exhibitions include Reminiscences II (2024) at T293 Gallery, Rome; Circle of Friends (2024) at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Quiet Resistance (2023) at Moenchehaus Museum Goslar; Rumi (2023) at Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; A Homage to Home (2023) at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; and Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023).

Amiri works predominantly in textiles to examine notions of home, as well as how gender, social norms, and larger geopolitical conflict impact the daily lives of women, both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora. Using textiles as her primary medium, Amiri searches to define, explore, and question these spaces. The figurative tendency in her work is due to her interest in the power of representation, especially of those objects that are ordinary to our everyday life, such as a passport, a vase, or celebrity postcards.

Erika DeFreitas’s interdisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.​

Taiessa (she/her) is a white settler and multi-discipline artist living in amiskwaciwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton. Her artistic practice explores themes of nurturance, longing, exchange, and (im)permanence. Conceptually driven while rooted in process, she works primarily in printmaking and soft sculpture. Taiessa obtained a Fine Art diploma with distinction from MacEwan University in 2018 before completing her BFA at the University of Alberta. Examining colonial extraction and speculating cautionary futures, Taiessa seeks to problematize our relationships to collection and exchange – instead proposing an understanding of care that divests from colonial power structures. In surveying the commercialization of plant collection, Taiessa was selected as the 2022/23 Artist in Residence at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre. The resulting body of work, variegata, was shortlisted for the 2024 Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize, with additional exhibitions at The Art Gallery of St. Albert, and the Art Gallery of Alberta (upcoming). Taiessa is grateful for funding provided by the Edmonton Arts Council and Alberta Foundation for the Arts, her involvement in community organizing, and her experiences as Education Facilitator at The Works Art & Design Festival that further support and inform her work. Care and reflexivity motivate her artistic, administrative, and pedagogical practices within and beyond these engagements.

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born, interdisciplinary artist who is currently based out of Oakland, California. Her work moves between text, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and time-based media. She often works with maps, seeds, food, and environmental histories to convey themes surrounding diasporic place-making, and the potentials of collective imagining and collaboration to combat environmental issues. Her work has been exhibited and screened throughout the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Center (2023); Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (2023); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2021); and internationally at Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh (2023); SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul (2022); and Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2021). Her work can be found in the public collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. Zheng has received various fellowships and grants from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (2023), Puffin Foundation (2021), and Headlands Centre for the Arts (2020), among other organizations. She holds BAs in Economics and English from Brown University, Providence (2010), an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley (2019), and is currently a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She co-facilitates an environmental justice reading group and is the Art Director for the Bay Area-based literary non-profit, Quiet Lightning.