Fariba Samsami’s Reframing addressed political events and gendered social realities in Iran, confronting the paradigms of oppression that impact women’s lives in Iran. She responded to the rapid rise and expansion of Islamic culture in the West through technologies of information exchange and social control.

Reframing included an installation that recreated an identity-card photo booth. The viewer was invited to sit on a chair and view video footage of veiled women demonstrating in Iran. Photos were taken of visitors while they were in the booth, and could be printed and taken home. However, these photos were edited to include a veil over the viewer’s head.

Fariba Samsami was born in Tehran and now lives in Montréal. She has a BFA from Concordia University and a BFA from the College of Decorative Arts in Tehran. Samsami has exhibited at the Conseil des arts textile du Québec (Montréal), Articule (Montréal), Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury, Ont.), Maison de la culture (Montréal), Atelier Silex (Trois-Rivières, Que.), Hamilton Artists Inc. (Hamilton, Ont.), Grave (Victoriaville, Que.), Le CEG (Sorel-Tracy, Que.), the Centre culturel franco-manitobain (Saint-Boniface, Man.), and Modern Fuel Gallery (Kingston, Ont.).

Parallel World: The Architecture of Survival was a sculptural and media installation incorporating photographs of temporary shelters in downtown Belgrade built by refugees from Kosovo and other migrants seeking a better life. Artists Boja Vasic & Vessna Perunovich constructed a shanty house in the gallery together with a two-channel video titled Gypsy Utopia. Their work considers the social, political and economic realities that force people into a nomadic existence. In this installation, architecture worked as a powerful visual and environmental force, making it impossible for viewers to ignore ostracized members of society.

Boja Vasic is a Toronto based media artist and photographer. His work has been shown at the 8th Havana Biennial in Cuba, VI Yugoslav Biennial of Youth Vrsac in Serbia, XIII International Art Biennial of Vila Nova de Cerveira in Portugal, Third Tirana Biennial in Albania, and at the Liverpool Biennial, Independents. His video were shown at festivals in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, and he has won several international awards including the Chris Award at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival, a Bronze Medal at New York Festivals, and the Gold Award at Dallas HeSCA Media Festival.

Vessna Perunovich is a Toronto-based internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist whose work embraces performance, video, sculpture, painting and drawing. She works with issues around home, displacement the notions of mobility and boundaries. Perunovich’s work constantly brings to forefront her own position on the borders of identity in its multiple formations (social, political, personal, cultural and so on). Born and educated in Former Yugoslavia, Perunovich moved to Toronto Canada in the late 1980s. Her artistic practice reflects the multifaceted nature of her diasporic experience; it is interdisciplinary, performative, and often transitory in form and content. The artist’s body and her personal experiences are always the point of reference for an aesthetics that operates intuitively, and practice that challenges one’s capability to move beyond barriers imposed by spaces, institutions, ideologies, or body’s own limitations.

The Roma (in) Ruins // Interpretive Essay by Vessna Krstich and Nikolas Drosos

The industrious gypsy peddler was a common figure in the city of Belgrade during the civil war years in the former Yugoslavia. Today, the Serbian capital is striving to recover from international isolation by promoting capitalist enterprise and urban regeneration, often at the expense of the Roma population. While organizations exist to prevent further exclusion, discrimination restricts their participation in the educational system and labour market. On the other hand, their own socioeconomic conditions as well as their ill-reputed status, further segregates this ethnic group from mainstream society.

Toronto-based documentary filmmaker Boja Vasic and artist Vessna Perunovich have returned to their homeland to document this marginalized community. The pair revisited their former neighbourhood in Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) and the gypsy settlement nearby, which they approached with a new sensitivity, after having spent twenty years living in Canada. Themes of displacement and exile are reoccurring leitmotifs in Perunovich’s oeuvre while political and anthropological issues shape Vasic’s cinematic work. Parrel World: The Architecture of Survival, represents their combined efforts to explore the economic, social and political dimensions of architecture and the idea of forced nomadism.

99 photographs of Roma gypsies in front of their homes don the gallery walls. Each shack is marked for demolition and the blurred backgrounds efface the high rise apartment buildings in the distance. The artists have also installed a replica of one of these shanty dwellings, which they assembled from discarded materials. By reorganizing waste into living quarters the Roma gypsies perform an act of ‘recycling’. The resulting ’organic’ edifices are perishable, forced to extinction much like its inhabitants. This type of architecture could be seen as the other ‘international style’ of the late modern era. Made from found materials, mostly wash of the big urban centres, these ephemeral structures can be found today in most parts of the world, from South America to Europe and Southeast Asia. They represent a parallel yet antithetical world to the structures typical of global capitalism: the ephemeral shantytowns versus the permanent glitzy high-rises, the architecture of survival versus the architecture of profit.

The distance between these two parallel worlds is also reflected in the two-channel video projection. Hidden from view in order to remain inconspicuous, the video camera slowly pans the desolate dump of this Roma encampment. It only surveys the sit and does not scan for more intimate details. While this trepidation creates an objective vista on the part of the artist/researcher it also makes us more self-conscious of our status as a privileged intruder.

Vesna Krstich is a Toronto-based educator, art critic and independent curator. Her research explores the interrelationship between art and experimental pedagogic practices from the 1960s onwards. She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialized in Contemporary Art. Krstich’s writing has appeared in Art Papers, Parachute, C Magazine, Canadian Art, and Curator: The Museum Journal, among others.

Nikolas Drosos is a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. He specializes in Modern Art, with an emphasis on Eastern European Art in its global context. He holds a PhD from the City University of New York and a MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

David Diviney’s Blinds, Hides, and Other Points of View presented found objects and appropriated imagery within an open and often-broken narrative. In this semiotic game, the meaning of an object is severed from its origins, leaving room for new interpretations.

David Diviney is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax) where he has worked since 2009. His recent projects include The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978, Jason de Haan: Noghwhere Bodili is Everywhere Goostly, Eleanor King: Dark Utopian, John Greer: retroActive, and Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg: The Way Things Are. He curated David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East, a retrospective of the late artist’s work that opened in 2011 at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) before travelling to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown) and the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena). He previously held the positions of Assistant Curator of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge) and Director of the artist-run centre Eye Level Gallery (Halifax). He has also taught courses at Alberta College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, Thompson Rivers University, and Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

As of 2024, David Diviney is the chief curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

To learn more about David’s work, you can view his Instagram @dmdiviney.

Identity is forged by connection with the other in concert with the other’s outlook on us. To realize this project, Gilles Morissette undertook a collaboration with over a hundred students from l'Anse-au-Sable school in Kelowna, pairing younger and older students to create a collective work exhibited at the Alternator. Each student was asked to paint the eye of his or her partner on an ordinary light bulb. The participants also took photographs of each other’s eyes, images that were transposed onto mirrors as part of the installation. Morissette puts the students in the situation of acutely observing each other. In doing so, he is creating the necessary conditions for an awakening of awareness of the other in each of the young participants.

Gilles Morissette works in sculpture, installation, art actions and photography/digital images. The in-situ work is inspired previously by specific elements of the site, be it the architecture, the history and the people who live there.
My art puts in situation beings and the spaces in which we exist. The place that we occupy on earth and the universe, the outlook that we project beyond the visible world. These immersive works allow the participant to become an integral part of the discourse: the being here. I seek to create an experience of space where it is possible to perceive and grasp what it may reveal. It is a face-to-face from which emerges a discourse between light and shadow, the visible and invisible, materiality and immateriality, sound and silence.

Gilles Morissette has exhibited across Canada, the U.S.A., in Europe and Japan. His work is represented in a number of permanent collections, among them the Canada Art Bank, Alberta Art Foundation, Toms Pauli Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Léopold-Hoesch Museum in Düren, Germany, The Hall of Awa Japanese Paper Museum in Yamakawa, Japan, and the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia - Fundo de Arte DANAE in Madrid, Spain. From 1998 to 2019, he was invited to participate in multidisciplinary exhibitions of the SMCQ Homage Series dedicated to current composers of Quebec.   

To learn more, you can visit Gilles’ website here.

Selling Venus, was created by Dominique Rey in a South Carolina striptease club. She photographed the erotic dancers in the intimacy of their dressing room at the very moment where, alone with themselves, they prepare for the game of seduction awaiting them on stage, when they turn themselves over to the gaze of the other.

These portraits seek to unveil, the artist stresses “the illusions and stereotypes while reactualizing the debate about women in oppressive roles.” Captured in the reflection of a glance, the pictures show women absorbed by their image, observing themselves, putting on makeup, and fixing their hair with scant attention to the presence of the photographer. In a play of glances and diverted attention, Rey suggests a representation of these women that is different from that of the simple reflection of male desire by emphasizing this more interior gaze, filled with hope and ambition.

Selling Venus, finds its origin in the artist's personal experience as a stripper in a club in Osaka, Japan. In this context, she took her first photographs revealing the ritual of physical and psychological transformation these workers practice every day, a ritual meant not only to prepare a game of charm and seduction, but also to adorn oneself in a protective suit.

Dominique Rey is a multidisciplinary artist based in Winnipeg, Canada whose practice includes photography, video, performance, collage, and sculpture. Her work delves into peripheral subjectivities, from individuals and groups of people on the margins of dominant culture, to performance-based works that mine the terrain of the unconscious. She is interested in examining the outsider within society, as well as a deep sense of being we have of being strangers to ourselves. For this reason, she utilizes modes of fragmentation to explore the construction of self, as it relates to current experiences of dislocation and disorientation.

For more information on Rey and her current work, visit her website.