Award-winning artist, writer and curator, Anique Jordan, looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. Working for over a decade at the crossroad of community economic development and art, Jordan’s practice stems from and returns to the communities that inform it. As an artist, Jordan’s work plays with the foundations of traditional Trinidadian carnival and the theory of hauntology challenging historical narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. She works across temporalities bringing historical data towards a contemporary analysis. This work creates space to reinterpret the archives offering a new and speculative vision of the future. Principally interested in Canadian histories which speak to Black Canada, women, working-class communities and explores the relationships between Black and Indigenous peoples, Jordan’s work ultimately questions the authority of the Canadian state. Jordan is the founder of Black Wimmin Artist, a network of over 100 artists which recently organized The Feast- a gathering of 100 Black women and gender non-conforming artists held at the AGO.

In 2017 Jordan was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the year award, she recently completed a 2017-2018 artist residency at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago) and is the 2018-19 Osgoode Hall Law School Artist-in-Residence.

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Serena Lee speaks about her work in video and performance in a talk entitled And Other Imaginary Lines.

Serena Lee’s practice stems from a fascination with polyphony and its radical potential to map power, perception, and belonging. She plays with cinema, voice, text, installation, performance, and conversation. Since 2010, Serena has been collaborating as part of Read-in, researching political, embodied, and situated practices of reading through shifting modes and disciplines; and more recently, as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE with artist Christina Battle, an ongoing sci-fi world-building project. Practising and collaborating internationally and close to home, recent projects have been realized with transmediale/Embassy of Canada (Berlin), Nynnyt/Hanaholmen Cultural Centre (Helsinki), Cubitt Gallery (London), Gemaal Op Zuid (Rotterdam), Vtape, Antimatter Film Festival (Victoria), Art Spin/Planet Storage, Blackwood Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery (London), Cow House Studios (Dublin), The Research Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Forest City Gallery (London, ON), Images Festival, FADO Performance/The Theatre Centre, Regent Park Film Festival, and Mountain Standard Time (Calgary).

Serena is active in the Toronto arts community through involvement with the Board of Directors for Vtape, Gendai Gallery, and Trinity Square Video, and professional roles with the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and OCAD University. Serena holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam) and an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (CA). Serena is third-generation Chinese-Canadian and was born in Toronto.

Moyra Davey presents her film Hemlock Forest (2016) which has a very explicit connection to Akerman’s 1977 work News From Home.

Moyra Davey is an artist based in New York, and whose work comprises the fields of photography, film, and writing. She has produced several works of film, most recently Wedding Loop (2017) as part of her contribution to documenta 14 in Athens. She is the author of numerous publications including Burn the Diaries and The Problem of Reading, and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Davey has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2017); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2016); Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); Kunsthalle Basel (2010); and Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2008). Her work is found in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Tate Modern in London. She was the 2018 recipient of the Scotiabank Photography Award, and in 2004 was granted the Anonymous Was A Woman Award.

Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue speak on their collaborative work as artists, curators and founders of FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) in a talk entitled Hers Is Still a Dank Cave.

Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell share a collaborative maximalist art and life practice that includes art production, exhibition and activism. Recently Logue and Mitchell presented Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. This epic installation/performance is a nightmarish vision of feminist terror where visitors are encouraged to dialogue about contemporary queer politics. They also collaborate on video installations that put radical feminist texts in conversation with contemporary queer theory using puppets, cats and paper-mâché tactics. Since 2010 they have operated the F.A.G Feminist Art Gallery in Toronto Canada. Mitchell works as an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University and Logue is currently the Development Director at Vtape.