AGM: Where the Tide Meets the Stream  

22 February 2025 from 2-5pm EST / 11-2PM PST
Followed by SAVAC’s Annual General Meeting (AGM)
Free event. Zoom closed captioning. The talk will be recorded. 
Register for the zoom link

Whose ideas, ways of relating, materialities, or methods do we claim as our lineage? In fall 2023, SAVAC invited fifteen artists from around the world to “fan out” about subversive, political, and genre-bending artists, writers, or activists from the global South and its diasporas whose works greatly influence their own. The Fan Out project emphasized collective learning and curiosity, while celebrating people whose practices have been systemically erased, historically overlooked, or otherwise plucked from context.

For this year’s Annual General Meeting, we continue building on Fan Out as a methodology that opens space for different streams of knowledge to meet, collide, and inspire. We are thrilled to host Khadija Baker, Emelie Chhangur, and Jayce Salloum, who will wade through the pool of people who inform their far-reaching multidisciplinary practices. Baker cultivates relations between communities with differing values through memory and storytelling, fostering bridges to mitigate cultural separation and conflict. Chhangur considers the underlying values and structures that shape our world and uses curation as a way of bringing people, processes, materials, or concepts together to form unlikely connections. Salloum’s videos, photographs, and installations emerge from intimate engagements with place, often braiding questions of community, exile, nationalisms, and resistance. Artists’ presentations will flow into a conversation and audience dialogue, culminating with SAVAC’s AGM and board elections.

What is an Annual General Meeting?

As an artist-run centre by and for artists of colour, we are accountable to our community. AGMs are held every calendar year and are open to everyone. We reflect on the past year and our role within the arts ecosystem, report on the organization’s financial state, and share overviews of current and upcoming programming. It is a valuable opportunity for reconnections between our board, staff and community. It is also when we elect prospective board members. Anyone who identifies as a person of colour is eligible and encouraged to vote.

If you wish to support SAVAC’s programming, you may send donations via e-transfer to indu@savac.net. Donations above $30 will receive a charitable tax receipt.

Khadija Baker is a Montreal-based, multidisciplinary artist of Kurdish-Syrian descent (born 1973 in Amuda, Syria). Baker immigrated to Canada from Syria in 2001; she completed her MFA studies at Concordia University 2012. She is a core member of the Centre for Oral History & Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University. Her installations investigate social and political themes centered on the uncertainty of home as it relates to persecution, identity, displacement, and memory. As a witness to traumatic events, unsettled feelings of home are a part of her experience. Her multidisciplinary installations often combine textiles, sculpture, performance, sound and video, and involve participative storytelling and performance to create active spaces for greater understanding. Baker recently in 2024 finished her research creation at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University.

Emelie Chhangur is a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada, known for her process-based, participatory methodologies, the commissioning of complex artworks across all media, and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside gallery contexts. Dedicated to questioning the social and civic role of the public institutions of art, Chhangur has developed a curatorially-engaged approach to working across cultural, aesthetic, and social differences through a practice she calls “in-reach.” She’s curated over 150 exhibitions and special projects, produced over 25 publications, and won over 30 awards in curating, public programming, education, and writing, as well as in 2019, the OAAG’s inaugural BIPOC Changemaker Award and in 2020, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence.  She is currently Director/Curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, where she collaborates with the architectural practice of KPMB to envision new museum architectures through a community-engaged design process for Agnes Reimagined.

Jayce Salloum tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, his projects being rooted in an intimate engagement with place. A grandson of Syrian or Lebanese immigrants, he was born and raised on others’ land, the Sylix (Okanagan) territory. After years of living elsewheres he planted himself on the unceded stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səíl̓wətaʔł. Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more. In/out of this context not that it really matters, Salloum has lectured, published and exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible and most improbable, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, National Gallery of Canada, Bienal De La Havana, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.