Critical Distance Profile Tag Peer-to-Peer: The First Circle

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.

Noor Alé is an independent curator, art historian, and writer. She is the Associate Curator at The Power Plant, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, decolonization, and social justice in the Global South. Alé has contributed to curatorial research, exhibition management, and public programmes at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Bowmanville; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and Art Dubai. She holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA in Art History from the University of Guelph.

Zoë Chan lives in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. She works as Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Presented across Canada, her curatorial projects have delved into a range of subject matter including storytelling, documentary practices, youth, food, and discourse around representation. She was a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Joan Lowndes Award in recognition of excellence in critical and curatorial writing in 2015. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University.

Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke Mooniyang/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto based independent curator, writer, and researcher. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, BIPOC alternative healing platforms functioning outside neo-libral definitions of self and collective care. Her ongoing research focuses on the intersections of longevity and pleasure as contemplative spaces for care work in the arts.

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator from Saskatoon living in Toronto. Her most recent exhibition, In the Rough (The Plumb, Toronto, 2021), explored the healing crystal industry and its imbrication with theosophical symbolism, medical technology and labour organizing in the 20th century. Her curatorial projects look at the materialist and mythological lives of commodities, including crystals, flowers, and cosmetics.
Kate holds a Master of Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2018 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award, the 2020 C Magazine New Critics Award and participated in the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency.