Critical Distance Media curatorial / exhibition-making practices

Noor Alé is a curator, art historian, and writer whose exhibitions and roles span international contemporary art institutions. Her practice delves into the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, cosmologies, and land relations pertaining to the Global Majority. Through a relational, transcultural and transhistorical lens her work unearths convergences that engender solidarities across ideological divisions. She has held positions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Abu Dhabi Project, New York; and Art Dubai.

francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist, and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. Her novel was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the DUBLIN Literary Award. As an accomplished writer and artist in her own right, Burnt Sugar at Critical Distance is francesca’s first curatorial project, and an experiment in storytelling across mediums.

Bushra Junaid is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, author, and arts administrator based in Toronto. Born in Montreal to Nigerian and Jamaican parents, and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Junaid is best known for exploring history, memory, cultural identity, and placemaking through mixed media collage, drawing, and painting. Pivoting on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” and reflecting on John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), Junaid’s landmark curatorial project, What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic was presented at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (2020) and included video, mixed media, mural, and photo-based works by Canadian and international artists, as well as rare archival items.

Kay Rangel works with archives, navigating erased history to bring visibility to contemporary artistic practices – particularly those rooted in her homeland, Mexico. She’s also focused on working with theories of place, queerness, and feminism. Her practice, as an artist, relies heavily on words too, pushing the viewer to explore the written language within the visual realm.

Fatma Hendawy Yehia is an Egyptian-Canadian curator, based in Toronto since 2017. Her curatorial practice focuses on investigating censored archives, questioning inaccessible histories, and navigating militarised spaces.

Since 2008, Fatma has held positions including Assistant Archivist at the Art Museum at University of Toronto, Head of Permanent Exhibitions at the New Library of Alexandria (2010-12), Assistant Curator at the AGYU, Toronto (2021-22), and Guest Curator at Images Festival 2022.