Indu Vashist

Indu Vashist has served as the Executive Director of SAVAC since 2013. Currently, she is serving her second term on Executive of the Board of MANO (Media Arts Network of Ontario), she sits on the Advisory Board of Blackwood Gallery, and the Advisory Council for Creative Time Summit hosted by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. She has written and published extensively including: “Redefining South Asia without Borders.” (Art Gallery of Mississauga, 2013); “From Collective to Institution.” (Surrey Art Gallery, 2015); “Family Photo Album.” (Art Asia Pacific Vol 95, Sept/Oct 2015); “What do you do?: Basil AlZeri’s You Do What You Love Because You Do One Two, and More Than Two.”  (University of Waterloo Art Gallery, publication forthcoming). Prior to working at SAVAC, she had been equally splitting her time between India and Canada. In India, she worked with artist, queer and feminist arts organizations and collectives: Bombay-based Queer Nazariya International Film Festival, Delhi-based Nigah Media Collective, and Madras-based Marappacchi Theatre Group.

Email: indu@savac.net

Abedar Kamgari

Abedar Kamgari is an artist based in Hamilton and Toronto. In her art practice, Abedar unpacks the contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora using site-responsive, durational, and relational approaches. She is deeply influenced by performance art and her pieces often emphasize and question the presence, absence, movements and responsibilities of bodies in relation to land and labour. Her current projects explore body memory, complicated inheritances, and the idea of distance, inspired by a play written by her father and garments passed down from her grandmothers.

Her art practice informs her work as a curator, writer, and arts worker. Abedar has developed programs on diasporic methodologies, performance art, race and the politics of inclusion, and contemporary art and gentrification. Abedar holds a BFA (2016) and an MFA (2022) in interdisciplinary studio and has performed, screened, and exhibited in a range of institutional contexts.

Visit: abedarkamgari.com or @kamgara on Instagram

Email: abedar@savac.net

Sophie Sabet

Sophie Sabet is a visual artist working in video, sculpture and installation.

Visit: sophiesabet.com

Email: communications@savac.net

Faisal Karadsheh

Faisal Karadsheh (b. 1999, Amman) is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist and arts administrator based in T’karonto/Toronto. His interdisciplinary approach spans painting, sound, video, installation, performance, poetry, extended reality, and community organizing. Through collecting and preserving material traces, his practice examines how the body adapts, reproduces, and constructs itself. Karadsheh’s work perforates the inherent boundaries between the body and its environment, exploring their connection and separation, while embracing their existential paradoxes. Narratives of skin, memory, communication, and identity often emerge. Most recently, he has been exploring experimental methods to capture absences and uncover presence within empty spaces.

Samar Salman

Heather Canlas Rigg

Heather Canlas Rigg is an independent curator and writer based in Toronto. 

photo by sarah bodri

Niyash Mistry

Niyash Mistry is a South Asian-origin advocate for the arts, whose arts engagement is rooted in a sense of social justice, anti-colonial action, and anti-nationalism. He is engaged on a long-term project to build a collection of artworks by contemporary artists from South Asian and in the diaspora, whose practices respond to socio-cultural realities, and situate the works within the context of current discourse on post-colonialism, rising ethno-nationalism, and gender-based experiences, among other areas. Niyash actively works to amplify the voices of South Asian artists in North America through initiatives that engage the collecting community, curators and public institutions to create impact for artists.

Outside the arts, Niyash has a decade-long career in risk management, working for Kroll, a global forensic investigations and corporate intelligence firm. Through this work, he advises governments, pension funds, non-profits and corporations on issues ranging from fraud mitigation, corruption and political risk, and governance best-practices.

Shalaka Jadhav

Shalaka spent their childhood between cities in India and in Dubai, before moving to a neighbourhood spitting distance from Ontario’s largest mall.  In their day job, Shalaka designs and facilitates curriculum and workshops that support young people in moving towards just, climate-resilient futures.  Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka has followed the advice of an aptitude test to pursue Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. In 2021, Shalaka was the Curator-in-Residence at the Centre for Art Tapes, and as of fall 2021, Shalaka will be an Emerging Curator as part of the inaugural University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery Visiting Curator Program.  

Elham Fatapour

Elham Fatapour is a Toronto-based visual artist and completed Master’s in Fine Arts at York university 2020 that was awarded a Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research
Council of Canada. Her recent works include painting, performance, and mixed media installation. They address diverse but interconnected subjects, including satellite usage, surveillance, vernacular architecture, modes of communication, and empathy.

Her ongoing ‘homemade satellite dishes’ series was the winner of the 2022 biennial art prize for the Surveillance Studies Network Conference and was presented at Rotterdam Erasmus University in June of 2022.

Sanjeet Takhar

Sanjeet Takhar is the Artistic Director of Toronto’s Music Gallery. As a curator and cultural programmer, Sanjeet focuses on amplifying the voices of emerging and underrepresented artists, and working to make legacy institutions more equitable and future-facing. Sanjeet has curated diverse lineups for major venues and events across Canada. Her work has been profiled in Now Magazine, Toronto Life, and the Toronto Star.

Nour Bishouty

Nour Bishouty is an artist working in a range of media including works on paper, digital images, sculpture, video, and writing. Her practice engages familial and material narratives to explore the extents of colonial legacies and pose questions around dissonance, opacity, legibility, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery44 (Toronto), Access Gallery (Vancouver), Darat Al Funun (Amman), the Beirut Art Centre, Casa Arabe (Madrid), and the Mosaic Rooms (London). Her artist book “1—130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan.” edited by Jacob Korczynsci, was co-published in 2020 by Art Metropole (Toronto) and Motto Books (Berlin).