Artists: NoTES FOR TOMORROW

Vajiko Chachkhiani

Vajiko Chachkhiani (b. 1985, Georgia) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Mathematics and Informatics at the Technical University, Tbilisi, before turning to Fine Art, which he studied at Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, and Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include GRA Glass Pavilion, Amsterdam (2009), Gallery Gala, Tbilisi (2011), BINZ39, Zurich (2012), The State Museum of Literature, Tbilisi (2013), and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany (2014). Group shows include Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2011), Stedelijk Museum, s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (2011), Meet Factory, Prague (2012), Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2014), Museum of Contemporary Art, Wolfsburg (2014), and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2015). Chachkhiani held a DAAD scholarship (2013), was awarded the prestigious 7th Rubens Promotional Award of the Contemporary Art Museum Siegen (2014), and was accepted for the ISCP Residency Program, New York (2016).

Luke Luokun Cheng

Luke Luokun Cheng is an artist and digital designer working in diverse media including installation, imagery, and performance. Through his perspective as a queer Chinese immigrant in the US, he magnifies private poignancies to tease apart the boundaries of intimacy and alienation within global power structures. He draws from his experience designing social software to shape his pieces as sites of interactive possibility, while his background in large format film portraiture informs a quiet, deliberate approach. He has exhibited at Assembly Room in NYC and was a member of NEW INC. He holds a BSE from Princeton University; was born in Jiangxi, China; and grew up in Virginia where he currently resides.

A Liberated Library for Education, Inspiration, and Action

Undocumented Projects
Zines
https://www.undocumentedprojects.org/new-page-2
https://www.undocumentedprojects.org/sanctuary-map

Chicago ACT Collective
Coloring book pages, zines, posters
https://chicagoactcollective.weebly.com/

Selections from Read/Write Library
Zines
https://readwritelibrary.org/programs/bibliotreka

Interrupting Crimitalization: #DefundPolice Campaigns
Resources and Toolkits
https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/

For the People Artists Collective - TBD
Coloring book
https://www.forthepeoplecollective.org/

Nothando Chiwanga

Nothando Chiwanga is an upcoming visual artist based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Currently studying at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe school of visual arts and design. She has participated in various workshops like the Realism by John Kotze, art ethics by Julius mushambadope, performance art by Sithembile msazane. She has participated in the tavatose art competition in 2013 and she was awarded with a first prize. Recently, she has exhibited in the new signature exhibition at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in 2019.

Shezad Dawood

Shezad Dawood works across film, painting and sculpture to juxtapose discrete systems of image, language, site and narrative, using the editing process as a method to explore meanings and forms between film and painting. His practice often involves collaboration, working with groups and individuals across different territories to physically and conceptually map far-reaching lines of enquiry. These networks chart different geographic locations and communities and are particularly concerned with acts of translation and re-staging.

Demian DinéYazhi´

Demian DinéYazhi´ is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.

Cao Guimarães

Cao Guimarães works on the crossing between the cinema and the visual arts. With intense production since the late 80s, the artist has been collected by prestigious names such as Tate Modern (United Kingdom), MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum (USA), Fondation Cartier (France), Colección Jumex (Mexico), Inhotim (Brazil), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Spain) and others.

Ilana Harris- Babou

Ilana Harris- Babou's work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited throughout the US and Europe, with solo exhibitions at The Museum of Arts & Design and Larrie in New York. Other venues include Abrons Art Center, the Jewish Museum, SculptureCenter, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the De Young Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Harris-Babou has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a BA in Art from Yale University.

Rei Hayama

Rei Hayama is a Japanese artist who works mainly with moving images. After many thoughtful and practical experiences amongst wildlife in the unique environment of her youth, she studied at the Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts, Tama Art University and has been making films since 2008. Hayama's films revolve around nature and all other living things that have been lost or neglected from an anthropocentric point of view. Through film and video works with sound, poetic writings and symbolic imageries, Hayama gently seeks the harmonious connection between nature and human beings, bringing forward the invisible layers of our natural reality into the human imagination. The philosophy of Hayama's work is deeply engaged with cinema and interprets the cinema space as an artificial nature. She describes her work as "A Humble Cinema" and explores multiple dreams after the dream of humans.

Amrita Hepi

Amrita Hepi is an award-winning First Nations choreographer and dancer from Bundjulung (Aus) and Ngāpuhi (NZ) territories. Her mission as an artist is to push the barriers of intersectionality in form and make work that establishes multiple access points through allegory. Her work is characterised by hybridity and engages in extending choreographic practices by combining dance and movement with other domains such as visual art, language and participatory research.

INVASORIX

INVASORIX is a working group interested in songs and music videos as a form of queer-feminist protest, composed of eight women artists who are between 25 and 36 years old and live and work in Mexico City: Daria Chernysheva, Waysatta Fernández, Nina Hoechtl, Maj Britt Jensen, Natalia Magdaleno López, Liz Misterio, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo and Mirna Roldán. Since Spring 2013 they have met regularly to collectively write songs and make videos that are based on their experiences: on precarity and on power dynamics in their environments, among others.

Tamás Kaszás

Kaszás Tamás * was born in 1976 in Dunaújváros, Hungary's first socialist town (former Sztálinváros, “Stalin-town”). He graduated at the Intermedia department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts where recently he has continued with his doctoral studies. Kaszás usually creates complex projects inspired by theoretical research. Then applies traditional and new media as well. By mixing poetic images with useful inventions in his exhibiting practice, art pieces appear mostly as special constellations in the frame of large installations (visual-aid). His projects are based on social questions and spiritual science. Keywords like collectivity, collapse and survival, self sustainability and autonomy, theory vs practice, folk science, home-made homes, cargo cult, etc. might give an idea about his main topics. In accordance with his conceptual background Kaszás tries to make an economic and ecological art practice using mostly cheap or recycled materials, techniques easily available for everyone. He often works in various collaborations, first of all with Loránt Anikó* (Ex-artists' collective) and Kristóf Krisztián* (the Randomroutines).

Ali Kazma

Ali Kazma is a filmmaker whose work explores a fascination with the actions of work and labor enacted by human bodies. Many of his works capture the minute specializations of a range of professions, performed by people who have developed a knack for their task; over the course of his career, Kazma has filmed a taxidermist, studio ceramicist, brain surgeon, factory worker in a blue jeans assembly line, watch repairman, butcher, and many others. His most famous and ambitious work to date is seven-channel film titled O.K. (2010), studying the stupendously fast hands of a notary stamping stacks of papers. For Kazma, processes of work, particularly those that have involved mechanical repetition or artisanal hand labor, are related to national and global issues of production, commerce, and social organization.

David Lozano

David Lozano is a visual artist with a specialization in painting. He has a Masters degree in Visual and Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Universidad de los Andes, Santo Tomás de Aquino and the Academy of Superior Arts of Bogotá. Currently he is a teacher and the director of the School of Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. As an artist, his work has focused on the investigation of the postmodern and globalized body.

Mona Marzouk

Mona Marzouk’s interest in architectural histories is visible in many of her works – in painting, sculpture as well as site-specific murals and paintings. Blurring the boundary between past and present day, man-made and natural, biomorphic and geometrical, personal and political, beautiful and ugly, and masculine and feminine, Marzouk redefines how we see the world. With the sensibility of a maverick architect, Marzouk envisions aesthetic systems that draw on a diversity of cultural traditions but which can only exist in the realm of the imagination. Her early paintings and sculptures reassemble disparate architectural elements from history as well as animal and body parts to construct unified compositions. Castles and cathedrals, crenellations and crustaceans merge together in fluid form. Her compositions, which often float in the center of a frame, reference post-minimalism, with their hard edges and flat expanses of solid color.

Joiri Minaya

Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose work investigates the female body within constructions of identity, multicultural social spaces and hierarchies. Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. She graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (2009), the Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcising imposed histories, cultures and ideas. It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service.

Peter Morin

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan ancestor artists. Morin’s work highlights cross-ancestral collaboration and deeply considers the impact zones that occur between Indigenous ways of knowing and Western Settler Colonialism. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, New Zealand, and Greenland, as well as across Canada and the United States. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

Omehen

Omehen: The Garden as Chronicle and Strategy of Resistance (2019-present) is an ongoing experimental collaboration that focuses on the creation, maintenance, and distribution of a precarious vegetable garden in Ateneo de Manila University. Omehen means “harvest” in the Manobo Talaingod language. In the forefront of the project is supporting the Lumad people of Mindanao, particularly the Bakwit Schools, and their struggle to seek refuge, education, and community in the capital as they experience land grabbing, redtagging, and state-sponsored killings. The project is a facilitation of exchanges of knowledges between all collaborators – students in Ateneo and the Bakwit schools, a Lumad agriculturist, Ateneo’s concerned staff, faculty, and administration – in growing four local crops namely ampalaya/bitter gourd, kangkong/”swamp cabbage”, sitaw/string beans, and okra.

Daniela Ortiz

Through her work Daniela Ortiz (Cusco, Peru -1985) aims to generate visual narratives in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and gender are explored in order to critically understand structures of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist power. Her recent projects and research deal with the European migratory control system, its links to colonialism and the legal structure created by European institutions in order to inflict violence towards racialized and migrant communities. She has also developed projects about the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers. Recently her artistic practice has turned back into visual and manual work, developing art pieces in ceramic, collage and in formats such as children books in order to take distance from eurocentric conceptual art aesthetics. Together with her artistic practice she is the mother of a 2 year old, gives talks, workshops, does investigation and participates in discussions on Europe’s migratory control system and its ties to coloniality in different contexts. Daniela lives and works in Barcelona.

Kristina Kay Robinson

Kristina Kay Robinson is a writer, curator, and visual artist born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her written, visual and curatorial practice centers and interrogates  the modern and ancient connections between world communities. Robinson’s work both at home and abroad focuses on the impact of globalization, militarism, and surveillance on society and their intersections with contemporary art and pop culture. Her ongoing installation and performance art project, Republica: Temple of Color and Sound has been presented  in exhibition at “Welcome to the Afrofuture” during Miami Art Week, New Museum’s residency program, Ideas City and the New Orleans African American Museum. Both iterations of Republica: Temple of Color and Sound received enthusiastic  reviews in Sugarcane Magazine and most recently PIN-UP magazine. 

Robinson is the co-editor of Mixed Company, a collection of short fiction and visual narratives by women of color. In addition to the anthology, the collective of writers  hosted free cultural programming in the city of New Orleans. Notable events included a reading and lecture by Black Arts Movement poet, Sonia Sanchez at Le Musée de F.P.C and the American premiere of the award-winning Eritrean- Italian documentary, Asmarina. Robinson’s other curatorial endeavors include Sudanese artist Khalid Abdel Rahman’s “A Disappearance” hosted in 2017 by the Arts Council of New Orleans.

Luiz Roque

Attracted by the power of image and, in particular, by sensations that stem from the sense of vision, Luiz Roque’s work crosses different territories, such as the genre of science fiction, the legacy of Modernism, pop-culture and queer bio-politics, in order to understand the propose ingenious and visually sensual narratives. The plasticity of the allegories he uses in his films takes us through the current conflict between technological advancement and contemporary micro and macro power relations. 

Roque’s works inhabit a space between cinema, art and critical theory; all within the scope of political dispute that is both real and imaginary. Furthermore, his works comment on the dissociative conditions of being: between the latency of life and respective bureaucratic definitions. In this sense, his works combine the splendour of science fiction - as a device for the dissemination of hypotheses - with resources from the language of cinema in order to present us with scenarios of social tension and complex public debates.

Mark Salvatus

Mark Salvatus (b. 1980). I studied Advertising at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and started as an artist as a street artist. Since 2006, I call my overall artistic project as “Salvage Projects” working across various disciplines and media. Basing it on the word ‘salvage’ or to save or rescue which is also the meaning of my surname, I try to build direct and indirect engagements using objects, photography, archives, videos, installations, participatory projects, and platform organizing that present different outcomes of energies and experiences. My preoccupations are based on constant movements and travels - coming from the countryside to the city and elsewhere, addressing and building new imaginations of the contemporary land –urban and rural, the glocal migrant and the vernacular historiographies. I am interested in communication and miscommunication as a form and as a structure and not as a process. A form that is unstable, vulnerable and precarious as a fluid form and not fixed or established. A practice that deals a lot with collecting, repetition and series based on my lived experiences and its relationship to the world.

Yan Shi

Born in Shenyang, Heilongjiang Province, in 1975, Yan Shi studied at the Photography Department of LuXun Academy of Fine Arts and Multimedia and Mixed Media Department at the Art College of Xiamen University. He now lives and works in Beijing. Yan Shi's artistic practice is inclusive and unrestricted by media or materials. Yan's profound observation of contemporary life is deeply rooted in examining, and dialogue with, art historical narratives. His artworks are presented in a straightforward manner, summoning the object itself to speak, and inviting the viewer into the unknown and open-ended exploration.

Ibrahima Thiam

Ibrahima Thiam, a self-taught photographer, was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1976. Thiam takes a journalistic approach characterized by photographic writing about human life. Intimate portraiture and innovative street photography. He captures and reinvents the visual language of everyday life with particular inspiration from the history of African studio portrait photography.

http://dakar-bamako-photo.eu/en/ibrahima-thiam.html

u/n multitude

u/n multitude is a community of artists and music historians, whose practice is inextricably linked with the performative and public activities. The authors call their works «political scores». Music in this case is a kind of lacuna for understanding social and historical conflicts through experiencing the moment in its duration. Music and performance become the politics itself.

Wayne Kaumualii Westlake

Wayne Kaumualii Westlake was a Hawaiian poet, a journalist, an educator, an artist, a scholar, and an activist born on Maui and raised on the island of Oahu. He earned his BA in Chinese studies at the University of Hawaiʻi. Before his tragic death, Westlake produced an innovative body of work: he translated Taoist classical literature and Japanese haiku and interwove perspectives from his Hawaiian heritage into his writing and art. The only collection of his poems available during his lifetime was a 32-page, limited edition chapbook independently published by a small press. The posthumous collection Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947–1984), edited by Mei-Li M. Siy and Richard Hamasaki (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), includes nearly 200 poems, many previously unpublished.

Notes for Tomorrow is a traveling exhibition organized and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI) and initiated by Frances Wu Giarratano, Becky Nahom, Renaud Proch, and Monica Terrero. The exhibition was made possible with the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, VIA Art Fund, and ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum. 

The presentation at Contemporary Calgary has been organized in collaboration with Chief Curator, Ryan Doherty and Associate Curator, Kanika Anand.