Presence
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal, Jayce Salloum, Christine Howard Sandoval, Abbas Akhavan, Badlands Art Residency x Lindsay Sutton, Linda Sormin
June 26—November 9, 2025
Presence is an exhibition about the ways we occupy and organize space, and the role it plays in shaping our sense of community. What makes a space hospitable for some more than others, and how do we find our place within space?
Drawing on the understanding of space as a socio-temporal construct, artists are invited to reflect on space as it is continually produced, contested and transformed. The exhibition is rooted in ideas of placemaking that centers community and networks of collective enterprise as cultural infrastructures in themselves, and is a gathering of projects and artworks that contemplates the evolving definitions of community and collectivity.
Presence is a window into a larger ecosystem of practices that emphasizes and empowers the ordinary or commonplace. It reflects the ways we are present in the spaces we inhabit. While focusing on lived and embodied experiences, storytelling and popular practices, the artists invite us to journey with them, to trace, explore and expand the ways we think of communities.
Upcoming Programs
Program Archive
About the Curator
Kanika Anand (she/her)
Kanika Anand is the Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary, Canada and co-curator of the Indian Ceramics Triennale, India. Her curatorial approach focuses on placemaking and social practices that interrogate structures of power and modes of engagement. Through a lens of interstitial discourse, constructs of time, social space, and traces of mobility remain a keen area of interest and research.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Delhi University and a Master’s degree in Art History from the National Museum Institute, India. She has been curatorial fellow at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (2012-13) and fellow at the Global Cultural Leadership Programme, organised by the Cultural Diplomacy Platform and the European Cultural Foundation (2018). She has worked extensively with galleries and institutions across North America, France and India and has worked on major exhibitions of work by Yoko Ono, Chitra Ganesh, Diane Arbus, Marcel Dzama, Paola Pivi. She has written for art journals like Ocula, Art India, and Art Basel and has contributed to several books on contemporary art.
