Panel 1 — Wandering Through Archival Possibility
Parastoo Anoushahpour
Parastoo Anoushahpour (Iran / Canada) is an artist originally from Tehran now based in Toronto working predominantly with film, video and installation. She was an artist in residence at the Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation (Jordan), Tabakalera International Center for Contemporary Art (Spain), Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), and Banff Center for Arts & Creativity (Canada). Her recent solo and collaborative work has been shown at Berlinale, MoMA, The Flaherty Film Seminar, Punto de Vista Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Viennale, NYFF, TIFF, Images Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Experimenta (Bangalore), and Media City Film Festival. Since 2013 she has been working in collaboration with Ryan Ferko and Faraz Anoushahpour. Their shared practice explores the tension of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures.
Faraz Anoushapour
Faraz Anoushahpour (Iran / Canada) is an artist, filmmaker, and programmer originally from Tehran and currently based in Toronto. He holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Architectural Association (London, UK), and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from OCAD University (Toronto). He was Programmer at Images Festival (2014-2017), and participant in the Belligerent Eyes residency at the Prada Foundation (Venice, Italy), among others. Since 2013 he has been working in collaboration with Parastoo Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko. Their shared practice explores the tension of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to both decode their surroundings and trouble the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery. Their recent work has shown at Punto de Vista Film Festival, Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Art (Spain), Sharjah Film Platform, Viennale, NYFF, TIFF, IFF Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Experimenta (Bangalore), and Media City Film Festival (2015-2018).
Ryan Ferko
Ryan Ferko is an artist working predominantly in film and video. Between cinemas and galleries, his work is concerned with landscapes as unstable sources of narration, turning to myth, storytelling, and distorted memories as a way to find narratives alternative to official histories. Based in Toronto, recent solo and collaborative work has been shown at Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Toronto International Film Festival-TIFF, Black Canvas Contemporary Film Festival, European Media Art Festival (EMAF), and Media City Film Festival, amongst others.
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko have worked in collaboration since 2013. Their shared practice explores the interplay of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to both decode their surroundings and trouble the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery. Shifting between both gallery and cinema contexts, recent projects have been presented at Mercer Union (Toronto), MoMA, e_flux, Berlinale, Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, Viennale, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and others internationally.
Panel 2 — Institutional Interventions: Archives, Collections, and Curatorial Negotiation
Luis Jacob
Luis Jacob (b. Lima, Peru) is a Toronto-based artist whose work destabilizes conventions of viewing, and invites collisions of meaning. Jacob has achieved an international reputation, with his work exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2022); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2018); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Taipei Biennial 2012; Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Hamburg Kunstverein and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (both 2008); and Documenta12, Kassel (2007). In 2016 he curated the exhibition “Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto” at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, with a catalogue co-published with Black Dog Press in 2020.
Sameer Farooq
Sameer Farooq is a Toronto-based artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. With a versatile approach that shifts between photography, documentary film, sculpture, and anthropological methods, he investigates strategies of representation to expand the ways through which museums have looked at the past through traditional forms of collection, interpretation and display. He has received his BA from McGill University, a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Farooq has held exhibitions at institutions around the world including the Jaou Photography Biennale, Tunis (2024). Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), Le 19, crac, Montbéliard, France (2024), Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (2023), Materia Abierta, Mexico City (2023), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2023), Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax (2023), Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto (2023), Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2022); Susan Hobbs, Toronto (2022); Patel Brown, Toronto (2021); Lilley Museum, Reno (2019); Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); The British Library, London (2015); Maquis Projects, Izmir (2015); Artellewa, Cairo (2014); and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011). Reviews dedicated to his work have been published by Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, La Presse, Canadian Art, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, Artnet, The Huffington Post, and C Magazine. He is an alumni of the Koher Arts/Industry Residency, the Bemis Center Residency and has been longlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent art award.
(@studiosameerfarooq on Instagram)
Sophie Hackett
Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. Hackett’s areas of specialty include vernacular photographs, photography in relation to queerness, and photography in Canada. She has curated and/or collaborated on a wide range of exhibitions and their accompanying publications, including What It Means to Be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility (2014), Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s (2016), Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 (2020), What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life (2022) and Casa Susanna (2023). Her published writing includes “Queer Looking” in Aperture (spring 2015), “Encounters in the Museum: The Experience of Photographic Objects” in The “Public” Life of Photographs (Ryerson Image Centre and MIT Press, 2016), and “Bobbie in Context” in the award-winning volume Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Steidl and The Walther Collection, 2020). Hackett is the editor of the first book on the AGO’s photography collection, Collective States: Worlds of Photography at the AGO (AGO / Delmonico Books, 2025).
Panel 3 — In Process: Process Cinema, Material Practice, and Archival Atmospheres
Crystal Z Campbell
Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working with archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold. Their practice spans moving image, painted collages, installation, handmade paper, glass, and sculpture. Campbell’s works have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Center, SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, Artists Space, Galerie im Turm, The Drawing Center, Berlinale Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Nest, Urban Video Project (Everson Museum), ICA-Philadelphia, MOMA, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Bemis, Memorial Art Gallery, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, ReMai Modern, St. Louis Art Museum, Flaherty Film Seminar, National Gallery of Art and others.
Awards include a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, and a DUKE DocX Fellowship. Campbell’s writing has been published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is an Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo in New York.
Timothy Yanick Hunter
Timothy Yanick Hunter uses self-led research and methodologies of recording and sampling to explore the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of the Black diaspora. References culled from a range of sources suggest shifting proximities, novel interactions between material and provenance. Historical photographs from museum archives meet ephemera from obscure corners of the Internet, overlaid with shards of music and spoken recordings. The resulting works are living mélanges, invested in alternative modes of making and thinking about memory, temporality, and the unknowable facets of existence.
Hunter received his BA from the University of Toronto, and has been artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland; and Black Rock Senegal, Dakar. He was included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, and longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award. His artwork can be found in the institutional collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The National Gallery of Canada. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, A Space Gallery, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Centre Clark, Montreal; ILY2, Portland; Kendra Jayne Patrick, Bern; Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph; and PADA Studios, Barreiro; Third Born, Mexico City; among others. Hunter lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Link to Hunter’s ongoing project: True and Functional.
Dr. Janine Marchessault
Janine Marchessault is a Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University. She is Principal Investigator for Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s AV Heritage (2018-2025), a multisectoral partnership between numerous audiovisual archives and repositories across Canada. The project also involved many field placements for students and case studies that brought together over fifty scholars, artists and curators to activate the archives.
The Archive is Creative 