Critical Distance PROGRAMMING PROGRAM: 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.

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.

Geneviève Wallen is an award-winning independent curator, writer, researcher, workshop facilitator, and mentor. Her curatorial practice, administrative ethics and pedagogy are informed by intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, and BIPOC platforms offering alternatives to neo-liberal care definitions.

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator based in Toronto. Her area of focus is on research-based artist practices and contemporary exhibition history.

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. 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.

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.

Liz Ikiriko is a Tkaronto/Toronto-based, Nigerian Canadian artist and curator. Her role as an educator, maker, and mother informs her practice, which focuses on African and diasporic narratives. Ikiriko holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University (2019). Her writing is published in Aperture, Public Journal, MICE Magazine, C Magazine, Blackflash, and Akimbo. She currently is the co-curator of Bamako Encounters 2021 Photography Biennale in Mali, West Africa and is the Curator of Collections and Contemporary Engagement at the Art Gallery of York University.

Sean Lee is an artist and curator exploring the notion of disability art as the last avant-garde. Orienting towards a “crip horizon”, he is interested in the transformative possibilities of crip community building and accessible curatorial practices that desire the ways disability can disrupt.

Lillian O’Brien Davis is a curator and writer based in Toronto, ON. She has held positions including the Curator of Collections and Contemporary Art Engagement at the Art Gallery of York University and Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.

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.