Biographies

ARTISTS

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He was named as one of six Indigenous writers to watch by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2016. He was the recipient of the P.K. Page Founder’s Award for Poetry in 2017. He recently published This Wound is a World (Frontenac House, 2017), his first book.

Mike Bourscheid is an artist living and working between Luxembourg and Vancouver. He recently represented Luxembourg at the 57th Venice Biennale. Bourscheid has exhibited extensively in Canada and abroad, including at the Centre d’art Oeil de poisson (Quebec City), Gallery 295 (Vancouver), Access Gallery (Vancouver), Nanaimo Art Gallery (Nanaimo), Galerie Nei Liicht (Luxembourg), insitu (Berlin), and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg). His work is in the collections of IBB Investment Bank Berlin and CNA Luxembourg.

Ginger Brooks Takahashi is currently working to open a neighborhood grocery store in North Braddock, PA called General Sisters. Ginger’s collaborative art practice is an extension of feminist spaces and queer inquiry, actively building community and nurturing alternative forms of information distribution. She is co-founder of the art journal LTTR, projet MOBILIVRE BOOKMOBILE project, and the live musical act MEN.

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. In her work she privileges what is felt over what is seen, by working with her body as an imperfect recording device to develop a cumulative embodied archive. Chambers’ interests are in re-imagining dance performance, and activating the dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her work focuses on how bodies have been choreographed by civic governance, architecture and topography, in relationship with how they have been choreographed by individual histories, cultures and spoken and unspoken social constructs. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Noa Giniger works within a wide range of media, including installation, film, sound, text and online works. She graduated from ENSBA in Paris. As part of her studies, she attended the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University for one year. She was a resident at De Ateliers, Amsterdam and a Royal Dutch Institute Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been presented in various international solo and group exhibitions. Giniger is half of the spoken word poetry duo Noon & Ain with musician Anat Spiegel. Noa Giniger lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

CURATORS

Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist and curator with a focus on collaborative, site-specific and community-engaged practices. Among other things, her artworks have included a geyser (with Erica Stocking), a garden best viewed by moonlight, and a series of events for sad people. She works as a curator with grunt gallery, where she manages residencies, exhibitions and special projects and is a member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, an artist-run organization that curates and produces artworks for the public realm. She is a founding member of the arts collective Norma who were honoured with a City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for public art in 2012. She regularly writes and publishes on art and culture, and is currently at work on projects in venues across the Pacific Rim (Vancouver, Sydney and Seoul) that explore sculpture and sound installations in public space.

Kimberly Phillips is Curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, where she oversees exhibitions, publications, and artist residencies. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of British Columbia and was an Izaak Walton Killam Doctoral Fellow. Her postdoctoral studies were supported by the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst at the Freie Universität, Berlin. From 2013-2017 she was Director/Curator of Access Gallery, a Vancouver artist-run centre committed to emergent and experimental practices, and previous to that she held the position of Curator of Interpretation at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2009-2013) and curator-in-residence at 221A (2012-2013). Phillips has authored, edited, and contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues, and her critical writings have appeared in Artforum, Canadian Art, C Magazine, The Capilano Review and Fillip. She maintains an active teaching practice, instructing graduate courses in modern and contemporary visual art and curatorial practice at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the University of British Columbia.