Critical Distance Media sculpture / installation-based practices

With an emphasis on play, Dee Dee Decay works with sculpture, performance, video, and the tender processing of materials. The close relationship they hold with their grandmother directly informs their practice through manual labor, slowness, repetition, and care, whether they find themselves at the metal studio or by claybeds of the Humber River. For Dee, creating from a land-based practice becomes the connective tissue that brings together their cultural investigations and reverence of death in the form of a tangled fruit net. This past year, they’ve developed an affinity for white swiftlets and the unique nature of their nests. Ongoing research explores colonial histories in South Asia and their personal experiences with homebuilding and migration. Dee is a queer Chinese-Viet…Find out more

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Agustine Zegers is a Chilean artist, writer, and bacterial community dedicated to the worlds of olfaction and symbiosis. Their work uses text, olfaction, and ritual in an attempt to comprehend and commune with flows of ecological collapse as well to question the pervasive systems that produce them. Their work has been exhibited at Critical Distance in Canada, Galería Metropolitana in Chile, and the Sharjah Art Foundation in the UAE. Their work has been published by the Institute of Queer Ecology, the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, DIS Magazine, and Genderfail Press. They currently live on Powhatan land (colonially known as Richmond, Virginia).

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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.

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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).

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