Fan Out

Get the zoom link

October 18 & 25, 7-9pm EST
at Gallery 44 (Suite #120)
401 Richmond Street West

October 28, 2-4pm EST
at the Commons (4th floor)
401 Richmond Street West

Accessibility: Closed captioning, chat, and reactions will be enabled in zoom. 401 Richmond is a physically accessible venue with an elevator. There is a ramp at the Spadina entrance. Speakers will use microphones. Masks are mandatory at in-person events. 

Presenters: Juneida Abdul Jabber, Naheen Ahmed, Lubnah Ansari, Patrick Cruz, Christina Hajjar, Rasha Kubba, payal kumar, Richa Narvekar, Sin Tung (Steffi) Ng, Rajee Paña Jejishergill, Tharmila Rajasingam, Shammah Salwa, Mohsin Shafi, Erdem Taşdelen, and Fan Wu.

SAVAC has invited fifteen artists to “Fan Out” about subversive, political, and genre-bending artists, writers, or activists whose work greatly influences their own. Taking the form of a series of free, public gatherings (both in-person and over zoom), artists from around the world will come together in the spirit of being big nerds. Fan Out is about collective learning and curiosity, while celebrating people whose practices are overlooked in art history, plucked from context, or otherwise forgotten to time. Join us!

Each artist will give a 10-minute passion presentation and answer questions from the audience. Presenters also contribute to a fanzine as a way of archiving and allowing this knowledge to live on. Keep an eye out for the Fan Out Fanzine, to be released in 2024!

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Fan Out is part of Threading Frequencies, in partnership with OCAD University and funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Thank you to our friends at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography for giving us access to their space.

BIOS

Tharmila Rajasingam, born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka is a Toronto-based installation artist working with performative and sculptural elements. Her practice examines the shifting nature of identity. Her work often includes cultural practices and religious rituals as a form of self-expression. Rajasingam incorporates time and memories in her work as a dialogue between the self and the other. The idea of the “everyday” and repetition are key elements when discussing rituals in her artistic practice. She has participated in many exhibitions in Toronto, such as Gallery 1265, Labspace Studio, AWOL Gallery and The {decommissioned} Shaw Street School.

Richa Narvekar trained to be an architect at CEPT Ahmedabad and The Bartlett, London and has a multidisciplinary design practice in Toronto/Goa. She teaches in the faculty of Environmental Design at OCAD. In both her academic and professional work, she is always looking for opportunities to challenge embedded Western paradigms; to decolonize.

Juneida Abdul Jabber is an urban guide, artist, zinester, and researcher based in Vancouver. In her practice she frames people within the space they occupy mapping networks and reorienting narratives. She co-founded Another Empty House, a collaborative research based project, exploring and documenting the rise of vacant domestic houses in Kerala, India.

Erdem Taşdelen is a Turkish-Canadian artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Through the use of diverse materials and media, he constructs semi-fictional narratives that incorporate unique historical figures, events and texts to implicate contemporary sociopolitical realities. Recent exhibitions include The Power Plant, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2023); Art Gallery of Burlington (2022); Mercer Union, Toronto; Oakville Galleries (2021).

Rasha Kubba is a Baghdad-born, Toronto-based artist focused on street photography and storytelling.

Shammah Salwa (b. 1995) is a Bangladeshi-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, photographer and researcher, based in Tkaronto. Combining documentary modes with surrealist techniques, her work engages with various environmental justice topics, with a special research focus on food in/security and food waste, and asks broader questions of how the personal or private is connected to larger systems. Salwa studied Environment/Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto and Photography at Toronto Metropolitan University. With the support of Access Alliance, she has designed a workshop on at-home vermicomposting methods to repurpose food waste. Salwa recently participated in a group exhibition as a part of DesignTO Festival 2023.

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labour. Visit: christinahajjar.com

Naheen Ahmed (she/her) is an illustrator and comic artist with chronic illnesses based in Ottawa. She uses her practice to explore the strength in vulnerability with bright poignant colors that remind her of her homeland.

payal kumar (they/them) is a multidisciplinary cultural worker, health justice advocate, abortion doula, and organizer whose work is rooted in radical Imagination. payal’s visual work alchemizes folk art from their ancestral villages in Bihar with traditional Americana motifs to amplify peoples’ movements and explore the in-between spaces of trauma, coloniality, queerness, and embodiment.

Sin Tung Ng (Steffi) (she/her) is interested in disrupting the flattening term of Asian and Immigrants through writing, art-making, community-based curation and art administration. As a newcomer in Canada, she also explores different practices of relationship-building, connecting the indigenous and newcomers’ communities. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Sin Tung/Steffi is currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto, pursuing her MFA Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University.

Mohsin Shafi is an interdisciplinary Lahore based artist, whose work is informed by his born-and-raised-Pakistani encounters and dissident reflections. He primarily engages local narratives from the Indian subcontinent, with focus on Pakistan, examining collective and respective chronicles of longing and belonging. He encompasses the themes of tensions and conflicts around navigating culture and identity. Shafi holds a Master’s Degree in visual arts and Bachelor’s Degree in visual communication both from the NCA Lahore. He served his alma mater for six years as adjunct faculty member in both departments and still is on the visiting faculty board. Shafi uses collages, photography, video, text, installations and at times performance for his art commentaries.

Lubnah Ansari is an artist-researcher who explores exercises of silences, intimacies, and agencies in India and the Gulf. They are currently a recipient of Alserkal Arts Foundation’s Research Grants, Mophradat’s Self Organizations program, and The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship.

Rajee Paña Jejishergill is an artist and educator of Punjabi-Filipinx descent born in Treaty 1/ Winnipeg and currently based in K’jipuktuk/ Halifax. Through textiles, sound, and still and moving images, Rajee explores personal memory, familial inheritance and diasporic subjectivity and emotionality.

Patrick Cruz is an artist and educator born in Quezon City, Philippines, who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Cruz creates installations that draw aspects from folk spirituality, play, and diasporic experience. In 2021, he received the Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2019, and won the 17th RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015. Cruz studied painting at the University of the Philippines Diliman and received a certificate in Pochinko clowning. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Cruz is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough and Daniels campuses and is the co-founder of the Ben Flores Fan Club Collective and the Kamias Collective which hosts the Kamias Triennial.

Fan Wu chases the contradictory ideal of the hedonist ascetic, of which type Ikkyu is a prime example. He is a writer, performance artist, and workshop facilitator. His current research project focuses on counter-capitalist poethics (a way of making-and-living) in early Daoism and in Georges Bataille, and how this poethics can become manifest in artistic practice.