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Presentations include talks, panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions, punctuated by
performances and screenings.

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR BIOS OF ALL PRESENTERS:
Featured Artist - Jayce Salloum
Keynote Speaker - Esther Shalev-Gerz
Keynote performer - Eekwol
Presenters: Judy Anderson; Shelly Bahl; Deanna Bowen; Soheila Esfahani; Brendan Fernandes; Bernard Flaman; Janna Graham; Terrance Houle, Michelle LaVallee, Cheryl L'Hirondelle; Ashok Mathur; Neal McLeod; Barbara Meneley; Srimoyee Mitra; Aleyna May Morin; Peter Morin; Wanda Nanibush; Michele Sereda; Charles C. Smith; 2Fik; Gary Varro; Rachelle Viader Knowles; Syrus Marcus Ware; Wendy Winter.

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Judy Anderson

Judy Anderson is a member of the Gordon First Nation (Cree) and works with painting, installation, sound and video. She holds an MFA (University of Regina) and a BA in Native Studies and BFA in painting (University of Saskatchewan). Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Indian Fine Arts Department at First Nations University. Her paintings, mixed media and installation works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canadian galleries since 2001. Her new expressive paintings come from an emotional exploration of her family’s past and present ‘moving’ stories, and the need to belong somewhere.

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Shelly Bahl

Artist Shelly Bahl (New York/Toronto), received her B.F.A. from York University and her M.A. from New York University. Her interdisciplinary work in drawing, painting, sculpture/ installation, photography and video, has appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally over the past 15 years. Bahl is a founding artist member of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and ZEN-MIX 2000: Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network in Toronto.
shellybahl.com

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Deanna Bowen

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto based interdisciplinary artist and Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Her recently commissioned video work/performed oral history piece, sum of the parts: what can be named recounts the 'disremembered' journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia in 1815. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous film festivals and galleries, including recent group shows at the Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Art Gallery of York University.
deannabowen.ca/

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Eekwol

For Eekwol, creation brings growth in all aspects of life. As a dedicated hip hop emcee, Eekwol astounds her listeners with honest and direct and revolutionary words that come from places both original and groundbreaking. With a lifelong background of Plains Cree Indigenous music, she gives the audience a balanced and healthy taste of experimental hip hop that comes from her land and place while respecting the history and place of original hip hop.

In 2010 Eekwol released, Niso, a solo EP dedicated to showcasing different producers and styles of sound while keeping true to her bold words and message. She continues to promote her new release and has just released a music video with Mils, producer/rapper/brother for the song, The Gauntlet.
myspace.com/Eekwol

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Soheia Esfahani

Soheila Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran and moved to Canada in 1992. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario, and a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. Esfahani’s art practice incorporates traditional Persian script within a modern composition. As a culturally diverse artist living in Canada, her recent art practice navigates the terrains of cultural translation and explores the processes involved in cultural transfer and transformation. Her solo exhibition, “Somewhere In Between: Poems, Pallets, Patterns,” was recently exhibited at Buffalo Arts Studio, Buffalo, NY.
soheila.ca/

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Brendan Fernandes

Born in Kenya of Indian heritage, Brendan Fernandes immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. Fernandes' interdisciplinary work recontextualizes images, objects, texts, and tropes associated with Africa and the African Diaspora, challenges hegemonic claims of authenticity, and uses them to reveal the multiple and contingent nature of cultural identities. He investigates the concept of authenticity as an ideological construct that both dominant and subordinate cultures use to their own ends. Ideas of “authenticity” shape cultural experience, and thus, the formation of identity. In his recent work he explores the dilemmas and codes that language create through ethnicity and sub-culture, where he is specifically looking at how vernacular can be learned and then forgotten once removed from its place of origin. He also considers the duality, hybridity, and nonsensicality coded in language through Dada where comprehension is negotiated through chance, but can also be associated with ideas of the primitive.
brendanfernandes.ca/

SHIFT will feature the opening reception for the exhibition, Brendan Fernandes: Primitive Tongues at Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum, Regina
Sat., April 9, 8:30 p.m.

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Bernard Flaman

Bernard Flaman is a registered architect working in the field of Heritage Conservation. His interest and research in modernist architecture has led to the delivery of papers on the Saskatchewan Power Corporation Headquarters in Regina and the design of Canadian Airports in the 1960’s. He co-curated the 2004 exhibition “Character and Controversy” at the Mendel Art Gallery examining modernist architecture in Saskatchewan. He has also participated in UNESCO’s policy development on modern heritage in relation to World Heritage designations.

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Janna Graham

Janna Graham is Projects Curator at Serpentine Gallery in London, where she oversees the Edgware Road Project. Based at the Centre for Possible Studies, a space invented to bring together artists, researchers, activists and local people in London's Edgware Road neighbourhood, the Project enables site specific enquiries about migration and urban space politics. Graham is also responsible for Skills Exchange, a project in which artists, care workers, community organisers and those living in care, work together to produce propositions for the future. Graham is a member of Ultra-red, Carrot Workers Collective and Chicago Boys, a pop band and neoliberalism study group. She has worked on writing curating, artistic and Education Projects with 16 Beaver Group (NY); Fuse Magazine (Toronto); Project Arts Centre (Dublin); the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff); Mercer Union (Toronto); Vannabbemuseum (Eindhoven); Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); Whitechapel Art Gallery (London); Plymouth Arts Centre (Plymouth) and Debajehmujig Theatre (Wikwemikong). She is currently a Phd candidate in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University.
serpentinegallery.org

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Terrance Houle

Terrance Houle is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe. Involved with Aboriginal communities all his life, he has traveled to reservations throughout North America participating in Powwow dancing along with his native ceremonies. Houle utilizes at his discretion performance, photography, video/film, music and painting, as well as tools of mass dissemination such as billboards and vinyl bus signage. Recently, his first “Major Solo Exhibition” GIVN’R opened at PLUG-IN Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), and is currently touring Eastern Canada. Houle lives and works in Calgary, Alberta.
terrancehouleart.com

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Rachelle Viader Knowles

Rachelle Viader Knowles: Originally from the UK, from a British and Mauritian family, Viader Knowles creates media based installations that often explore the sense of transience, rootlessness, and longing that accompanies the freedom to move. Her ongoing web/text/performance project, The Former Resident Project, explores places through the narratives of the no-longer resident. In 2009 she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Paris Studio residency to develop new works in response to the writings of Georges Perec. The results of this residency and a subsequent residency at the Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina, USA, were featured in a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Regina in 2010. Viader Knowles is Head and Graduate Coordinator of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, where she leads the area of Intermedia and teaches Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.
www.uregina.ca/rvk

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Michelle LaVallee

Michelle LaVallee has been Assistant Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery since 2007. She is a curator, artist and educator of Ojibway ancestry, and a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Band, Cape Croker, Ontario. LaVallee holds a BFA and BEd from York University, Toronto. She is currently pursuing an MA Art History and Curatorial Studies in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at the University of Regina, where she is focusing on the Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporated (PNIAI) and their influential role in Canadian art history.

LaVallee’s curatorial work has explored the colonial relations that have shaped historical and contemporary culture through exhibitions such as: To Be Reckoned With…(2010); Blow Your House In: Vernon Ah Kee (2009); and Miss Chief: Shadow Catcher--Kent Monkman (2008). She was a participant in the Canadian Aboriginal Curators Delegation sent to the 2010 and 2008 Biennale of Sydney and a recipient of the 2006 Canada Council for the Arts Assistance to Aboriginal Curators Grant for Residencies in the Visual Arts.
mackenzieartgallery.ca

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Cheryl L'Hirondelle

Cheryl L'Hirondelle is a singer/songwriter and multi-disciplinary artist. A mixed-blood (Metis/Cree-non status / treaty, French, German, Polish) originally from Alberta, her creative practice investigates the junction of a Cree worldview in contemporary time and space. L'Hirondelle's projects span a wide array of disciplines including: music, performance art, spoken word, storytelling, theatre, installation, public/community art, audio art, pirate radio and net.art. Her various artistic activities have had her creating and presenting in the national artist-run gallery networks as well as new media labs/centres, community organizations, educational institutions, the women's prison system and First Nations bands and tribal councils. In both 2005 and 2006, L'Hirondelle was the recipient of the imagineNATIVE New Media Award for her online net.art projects: treatycard, 17:TELL and wêpinâsowina. In 2010, she premiered Toronto Songlines, a new collection of songs written as she re-traced old Indigenous trails and hunting/gathering and ceremonial locations around current-day Toronto.
http://www.cheryllhirondelle.com/

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Ashok Mathur

Ashok Mathur is the Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, where he directs the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada. He is the author of four novels and other creative works and also edits, writes, and performs in the area of research-creation. He is the lead and co-editor of "Cultivating Canada: reconciliation through the lens of cultural diversity," published by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in April, 2011.

The book will be launched at the SHIFT Symposium on Sunday, April 10.

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Aleyna May Morin

Aleyna May Morin is originally from Lac La Ronge Indian Band (Sucker River) and has Métis roots from Beauval and Green Lake, Saskatchewan. Aleyna grew up in Prince Albert and currently resides in Saskatoon, where she uses media production and tools for healing and understanding. In 2006, she graduated from the Pacific Audio Visual Institute with a certificate in Audio Engineering and Production. For the last 3 years, she has been involved with various organizations working with youth, most notably with media arts organization Paved Arts, as the Outreach Coordinator.

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Neal McLeod

Neal McLeod is Cree (having grown up on the James Smith reserve in Saskatchewan) and Swedish having had the fortunate opportunity to study abroad at the Swedish Art Academy at Umeå. Neal has exhibited his art work throughout Canada including the 2005 exhibition au fil de mes jours (in my lifetime) at Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec, remounted at the Museum of Civilization in 2007. In addition to being a painter, McLeod is also a curator.

Neal’s first book of poetry entitled, Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow, was nominated for several Saskatchewan book awards and won the Anskohk McNally Aboriginal Literature Awards 2005 poetry book of the year. In 2007, he published Cree Narrative Memory, and in the fall of 2008 published his second book of poetry, Gabriel’s Beach. He is currently editing a volume entitled Indigenous Poetics and working on several other books. McLeod teaches Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

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Barbara Meneley

Barbara Meneley is a Canadian prairie-based intermedia artist whose site responsive work engages with landscapes of contemporary society and culture. She has an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Regina and has exhibited her work across Canada and the United States. In the context of the Canadian government's 2008 apology for Residential Schools, and its subsequent 2010 withdrawal of funding to First Nations University, Meneley's performance, "unofficial apology," offers a critical response to official deficiencies by incorporating Canadian flag imagery and the signalling language of semaphore to enact and re-enact apology. www.barbarameneley.com/

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Srimoyee Mitra

Srimoyee Mitra is a performance artist, curator and writer. She completed her M.A. in Art History at York University, Toronto in 2008. Since then she developed a multi-disciplinary installation entitled Let’s Talk, Get to Know Each Other Better, We Are All Human, in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Youth Council. Her performance, Becoming a Canadian Citizen at the AGO and Thinking About Contemporary Art, premiered at the Extra-Curricular: Between Art and Pedagogy (February 2010) conference at the University of Toronto. Her performances have been featured in venues as diverse as Carla Garnet Projects in NightLight, Nuit Blanche (Lansdowne) and Toronto Free Broadcasting. Her recent curatorial projects include Crossing Lines: An Intercultural Dialogue at the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant, and Reply All, an online collaborative project commissioned by SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and Art Metropole. Mitra is the Programming Co-ordinator at SAVAC in Toronto.

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Peter Morin

Artist, storyteller, writer and curator Peter Morin spent 4 years working with Redwire Magazine, as a community educator and advocate for First Nations youth, through media, writing and art. Peter Mori is the editor of Bannockology : A Community Collaboration of Stories, Art, Essays, Recipes and Poems Initiated by Liard Valley Literary Society. He is a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. In 2010, Peter completed his second Artist’s Residency, Memory Talking Stick, at Open Space, Victoria, focused on celebrating stories of cultural learning, sharing questions about cultural practice and honouring how our cultural learning has positive effects on our lives. Peter is of the Crow Clan of the Tahltan Nation of Telegraph Creek, BC.

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Wanda Nanibush

Wanda Nanibush is the Executive Director of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts (ANDPVA), the oldest Indigenous arts organization. She is also a curator whose work re-contextualizes Indigenous time-based media and performance art in terms of its philosophical complexity and rethinks how culture is framed. Her shows have included Mapping Resistances, (post) Colonial Stress Disorder, Rez-Erection and Chronotopic Village. Her recent writing appears in FUSE and This is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades.

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Jayce Salloum

Jayce Salloum’s videotapes, photographs, installations, and other cultural projects engage the personal/subjective and the public, and the political and the social, reconfiguring notions of identity, community, history, boundaries, exile, (trans)nationalism and resistance. His work has involved production and facilitation in many locales including Lebanon, Palestine, Berlin, New York, the former Yugoslavia, Kamloops, Kelowna, Cumberland House, Vancouver, Aotearoa, Afghanistan and Australia. He has exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; and the 15th Biennale Of Sydney. He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.
Feature article: Canadian Art, Fall 2010

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Michele Sereda

Michele Sereda is the artistic director of Curtain Razors, and an independent actor, director and instructor. She is an award-winning artist who works provincially, nationally, and internationally. Embracing experimentation in the performing arts, as the co-founder/artistic director of Curtain Razors Sereda provides opportunities for artists within various disciplines and members of diverse communities to explore new ways of telling stories through the practice of contemporary theatre. Most recently, Sereda was nominated for a 2009 Innovation of the Arts – Mayor Arts and Business Awards, received a 2008 Regional Center of Expertise Award from the University of Regina, and is honoured to continue another partnership with the MacKenzie Gallery performing at Shift and the co-presentation of Ballet by Szuper Gallery in April.

SHIFT will feature Sereda's performance, Navigating
Friday, April 8, 7:30 p.m., presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

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Esther Shalev-Gerz

Born in Lithuania, raised in Israel and resident in Paris since 1984, Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognized for her seminal investigation into the nature of democracy, citizenship, cultural memory and spatial politics. Her works challenge the notion and practice of portraiture and consider how its qualities may contribute to contemporary discourses about the politics of representation.

Her installations, photography, video and public sculpture are developed through active dialogue, consultation and negotiation with people whose participation provides an emphasis to their individual and collective memories, accounts, opinions and experiences which then become simultaneously represented. Constantly inquiring into transitional qualities of time and space and the correlative transformation of identities, locales and (hi)stories Esther Shalev-Gerz has produced a body of work that simultaneously records, critiques, and contributes to our understandings of the societal role and value of artistic practice. Esther Shalev-Gerz was the subject of a major retrospective in 2010 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
www.shalev-gerz.net

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Charles C. Smith

Charles C. Smith is a published poet, playwright and essayist. He won second prize for his play Last Days for the Desperate from Black Theatre Canada. He has edited three collections of poetry, has one published book (Partial Lives) and his poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Poetry Canada Review, the Quille and Quire, Descant, Dandelion, the Amethyst Review, Bywords, Canadian Ethnic Studies and others.

Smith recently received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council’s Writers Reserve Grants Program and is currently working on a multidisciplinary performance piece based on his poetry. This piece is being produced by Sparrow in the Room and involves such artists as Kevin Ormsby (dance), Olga Barrios (dance), Liz Pead (stage design), Jeremy Mimnagh (video works), Robin Styba (photography), Roger McTair (film) and Anahita Azrahimi (production and visual arts)..

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2Fik

Born in Paris in a Moroccan Muslim family, 2Fik lived in France and Morocco before moving to Montreal in 2003, where he found a fusion of religion, politics and society. As director, photographer and model, 2Fik keeps tabs on fundamentalism, sexism, and prejudice in his photo-soap-operas, performing various ethnic and gendered roles. His workshop will uncover multiple ethnicities in contemporary culture, tracing intricate global networks generated by immigrants.
http://www.2fikornot2fik.com/

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Gary Varro

Gary Varro is a curator, visual artist and designer based in Regina, Saskatchewan. In 1996, he established Queer City Cinema, a lesbian and gay film and video festival, which includes a touring component to various urban centres across Canada. Now known as the Biennial International Queer Arts Festival of Regina, the 8th installment took place in June 2010 and featured visual art, sound art, performance art, and film screenings.

As a visual artist, Gary has exhibited his installation artwork locally, provincially, and nationally, and has appeared in numerous performance artworks over the last fifteen years. In the film industry, Gary works as an art director and production designer.

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Syrus Marcus Ware

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Black, Gay and Transgendered visual artist, community activist, researcher, youth-advocate and educator. He is the Program Coordinator of the Teens Behind the Scenes program in the Education Division of the Art Gallery of Ontario. As a visual artist, Syrus works within the mediums of painting, installation and performance art to challenge systemic oppression and to suggest a different view of the world in which he lives. Syrus’ work explores the spaces between and around identities; acting as provocations to our understandings of gender, sexuality and race. Syrus has a specialist degree in Art History, an Honours B.A. in Visual Studies and an MA in Sociology and Equity Studies from the University of Toronto. In 2009, Syrus co-edited an issue of the Journal of Museum Education entitled Building Diversity in Museums, which focused on strategies for diversifying galleries and museums internationally.

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Wendy Winter

Wendy Winter became a gallery educator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in 1983. Always encouraged and amazed by the engagement of youth with art at the MacKenzie, and their joy of creating art in the studio, Winter perceived the value of a special multi-visit program with artist residencies and special full-day tours for students attending inner-city and Aboriginal schools. In 1997, the MacKenzie Urban Outreach Program was initiated and is now a core program. Urban Outreach has also branched out to include special bridging projects between diverse communities resulting in featured exhibitions and programming.

In 2010, Winter was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Arts Award in Arts and Learning from the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
mackenzieartgallery.ca

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©Strandline Curatorial Collective and MacKenzie Art Gallery 2011