Critical Distance Media moving image / time-based practices

Amin Alsaden is a curator, scholar, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. His curatorial practice is committed to advancing social justice through the arts, and to disseminating more inclusive narratives that decenter existing canons and challenge hegemonic epistemological and power structures. His exhibitions invariably raise questions concerning the interrelated domains of geography, colonialism, extraction, organized violence, and displacement.

Zoë Chan lives in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Since 2018, she has worked as Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she curated Uncommon Language (2020-21), and co-curated Where do we go from here? (2020-21) and Stories that animate us (2021). While working as an independent curator between 2012 and 2019, she delved into a range of subject matter including documentary practices, youth, food, and discourse around representation in art and visual culture. Her curatorial projects have been presented by Trinity Square Video, Vidéographe, Kamloops Art Gallery, Optica, MSVU Art Gallery, Foreman Art Gallery, Articule, and the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels).

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.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist born in Brooklyn, NY, the ancestral space of the Lenni-Lanape. She is a descendant of the Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi peoples, and her distinct visual language centers indigenization and the power in ancestral knowledge and memory through photography, printmaking, video, sound, and assemblage.