MONITOR 16
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED. Due to the large volume of applications, only the selected artists will be notified by March 2026. Thank you for your interest in Monitor 16!
The 16th iteration of MONITOR , our longstanding experimental film and video program, will be collaboratively curated by Sameena Siddiqui and Vicky Moufawad-Paul.
MONITOR is dedicated to the presentation of experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas. Since 2005, SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through artists’ works that transcend languages, borders, and political divides.
Artists and filmmakers are invited to submit new, independent, and innovative works that balance aesthetic explorations with critical narratives and subject matters. We encourage artistic approaches that are creative, unconventional, and take risks in their form, content, and style.
Explore past editions of MONITOR.
Selected works will be screened throughout 2026 in Toronto, Canada, and internationally. Artists will receive screening fees based on payment standards set by IMAA (Independent Media Arts Alliance).
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Sameena Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. She has presented her academic research at international conferences, residencies, and has published in peer-reviewed journals. Her scholarly and curatorial work engages with vernacular modernisms, photography and digital cultures, environmental humanities, and the politics of resistance, refusal, and futurity. She examines how visual practices intersect with histories of labour, citizenship, marginalization, erasure, caste, occupation, and settler colonialism. Situated within decolonial feminisms and transnational frameworks, her research foregrounds politically engaged artistic practices that interrogate infrastructures, migration, ownership, difference, belonging, collective care, and radical imaginaries.
Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a Toronto based curator and writer. She is the Director/Curator at A Space Gallery. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis which simultaneously offers substantive analyses of world politics and embodies processes of enacting justice. She is interested in the ways that experiences of colonialism and complex diasporic intersectionalities can demonstrate new possibilities for transnational solidarity. Given the significant archival silences on the subject, she is particularly interested in strategies for self-determination, including opacity and refusal.
She has curated exhibitions at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Carlton University Art Gallery, Gallery 101, MAI: Montreal arts interculturels, Latitude 53, Museum London, McIntosh Gallery, Contact Photography Festival, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, A Space Gallery, and 16 Beaver. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario and an MFA in Film and Video from York University. Moufawad-Paul has published texts on several artists including Harun Farocki, James Luna, Emily Jacir, Wafaa Bilal, Taysir Batniji, Paul Dennis Miller, Deirdre Logue, Mohammed Mohsen, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, Basil AlZeri, Erica Lord, John Halak, Rehab Nazzal, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Akram Zaatari, and Yto Barrada.
Poster design by Miao Xuan Liu with images from works by Ali Satri Efendi, Abeer Khan, Nimisha Srivastava, and Paribartana Mohanty.
