Critical Distance Media body / performance-based practices

Oluseye is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. Using “diasporic debris” — a term he coined to describe the artifacts he collects on his trans-Atlantic travels — he traces Blackness through its multifaceted migrations and manifestations. These transformational objects are recast into sculpture, performance, and photography; their explorations invoke his personal narratives within a broader examination of Black and Diasporic identity, migration, and African spiritual traditions. Oluseye has exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Fransisco (2024), Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2024), Southern Guild Gallery, Cape Town (2023), and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2023), among others.

Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their practice is invested in the dissolution of boundaries between different art forms and arts communities, trans and queer histories and futures, community practice, and the intersections of art and popular culture. Dallas is a member of curatorial duo Crocus Collective and a cofounder of Silverfish, an arts publication devoted to interdisciplinary collaboration, skill-sharing, and cultivating ongoing dialogues between emerging artists and writers.

Emma Steen is a freelance curator and writer, as well as the Director of Membership for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. Her area of interest lies in art that explores intimacies, bodies, and gathering with anti-colonial intention. Her background also includes extensive work in community arts organizing, arts administration, and supporting methods of institutional accountability. 

As a writer Emma has contributed to many arts & culture publications and art galleries. In 2020 she was awarded OCAD’s Outstanding Master’s Thesis/MRP Writing Awards for her paper, “Why the 90s Were so Sexy: locating sexuality, pleasure and desire in work produced by Indigenous women identified artists during the 1990s and early 2000s in Canada.”

Magdalyn is a curator and writer. Her practice explores embodied experience in relation to Western display practices and methods of knowing, taking into account familial knowledge, folklore, spirituality, and generational trauma. 

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances, works for camera, installations, and writings centre histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. Her performances in relation to objects in exhibition, scores, and ancestral belongings generate what she has come to call felt structures.