Critical Distance Media fibre arts / textile / paper-based practices

Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist and curator, working between Canada and India. Her visual practice extends to decolonizing distinctions between art, craft, and design, while her curatorial practice is focussed on the wider South-Asian diaspora and contemporary art from India.

Tamhane graduated with a BA in Art History from Carleton University, Ottawa, an MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester, and an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices from Concordia University, Montreal. She has been a Research Fellow with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009) and an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (2013). She has held positions as an Editor at Phaidon Press, London (2002-2006), an Assistant Curator at The Power Plant (2007-2008), Toronto, and a Producer of Contemporary Art Projects at Luminato Festival (2016).

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator based in Toronto. Her area of focus is on research-based artist practices and contemporary exhibition history. Her recent exhibitions include Nicole Coon: Jetee (Beauty Supply, 2024), Andrew James Paterson: Never Enough Night, co-curated with Laura Carusi and Anthony Cooper (the plumb, 2024), Louise Lawler, Louise Noguchi (Beauty Supply, 2023), and John Devlin: Out of a Heart of Quiet (Erin Stump Projects, 2022).

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.

Shaya Ishaq is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer whose research interests are engaged in craft, diaspora, design anthropology, and (afro)futurism. Devoted to materiality, she works with textiles and clay to create wearable art, jewelry, and installations. She has studied Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University and has previously attended Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. In 2023 Ishaq received the Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

Stephanie E. Creaghan is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work about how violence presents itself in communication, combining different forms of language (visual/audio/spatial/temporal) to reveal latent forms of manipulation.