Image credit: Niloufar Samadi, film still from Touchscape, 2024. Image courtesy the artist.
Worlds Among Us: MFA Graduating Exhibition 2024
SEP 5 – 21 2024*
Opening Reception
SEP 4 / 6 – 8PM
Audain Gallery, Lobby, and Studio T, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
Irfan Brkovic
Kevin Jesuino
Ghazal Majidi
Liz Oakley
Niloufar Samadi
Taryn Walker
Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore... Exponentially generative, engaged, engorged, desire is not more wanting but our informed seeking. Desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire. It is closely tied to, or may even be, our wisdom.
— Eve Tuck
There is another world, and it is this one.
— Paul Éluard
Worlds Among Us presents the culmination of artistic research and creative practice by students graduating from the Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts Program in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
This cohort of artists has found that, rather than arriving at answers, their respective inquiries have only provoked further questions. Through material and somatic explorations of received histories, inheritances, and societal structures, deeply emotive encounters in space, as well as playfully “improper” experiments with digital and analogue media and modes of display, the presented works invite considerations of the following:
Can a city be softened? Can sound be a paintbrush? Can a body be an archive? Can a film be felt? Can a cloud be held? Can pylons be a portal? Can a dream be played? Can longing be a landscape? Can what’s at hand become what’s possible? Can an impulse build a world?
The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
*The 2024 MFA cohort also includes Justine A. Chambers and Tung Pang Lam, whose thesis works The Brutal Joy and Until the Mountain Is Covered by the Snow, respectively, were presented before audience communities earlier this spring.
Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU in partnership with SFU Galleries.
Artist Biographies
Born in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Irfan Brkovic is an artist who works across performance, installation, and video. His work explores the post-industrial era and abandoned military complexes of former Yugoslavia. He has presented internationally in galleries, theatre, and music festivals, alongside interventions in public spaces. After working between Europe and the USA, he moved to Canada to pursue his Masters studies and serve as a researcher at the Precursor Lab within the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver. Brkovic is also a video artist at The Wooster Group and a founding member of Phase Space NYC, a collective dedicated to exploring media, performance, creative coding, and interdisciplinary art practices.
Justine A. Chambers is a bi-racial Black dance artist and educator living on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her most recent works are activations of the aesthetic practices of Black vernacular line dance and Black dandyism as de-colonial imaginings. Her choreography is concerned with the provisional questions: “What If?” And “Now what?” as processes towards imagining otherwise. Chambers’s work has been hosted by Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Western Front, Sophiensaele (Berlin), National Arts Centre, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at University of British Columbia, SFU Galleries at Simon Fraser University, Artspeak Hong Kong Performing Arts Festival, Agora de la Danse, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, and Art Museum at University of Toronto. She was the recipient of the Lola Dance Award (2017), Chrystal Dance Prize (2017 & 2023) and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2023. She is currently faculty at the School for the Contemporary Arts. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Kevin Jesuino’s creative process intertwines movement, performance, interventions, participatory practice, pedagogy, and performative inquiry, resulting in site-specific and socially engaged works. Their artistic vision is deeply collaborative, process-oriented, and politically/socially engaged, drawing inspiration from the post-studio movement, theatre/dance, performance art, participatory practice and activism. They delve into themes ranging from public and private landscapes, theatre of the everyday, uncertainty, urbanism, masculinity, queer history, and place-based knowledge. At the core of their artistic mission lies the exploration of power dynamics, access, participation, and authority. Their work aims to empower the public to shape their own futures while navigating the complexities of contemporary experience and interpersonal dynamics.
Tung Pang Lam shares the same experience with many other Hong Kong artists who grew up in 1990s, whose coming-of-age coincides with drastic social changes. Traversing between the media of painting, site-specific installation, sound, and video, Lam’s playful practice arises from a curious imagination that recombines traditional iconography and vernacular elements, innovating with a myriad of found objects and images to form new practices that are often experimental in nature. Lam’s works engage the themes of collective memories and fleeting nostalgia, which articulate an ongoing negotiation of the overlapping city-state’s reality. In his allegorical landscapes, journeys and sceneries become essential passages connecting time and distance, longing and loss.
Ghazal Majidi is an interdisciplinary new media artist and filmmaker from Tehran, currently based in Vancouver. Her body of work spans 3D animation, XR, video game, audiovisual, and film. Distorting conventional narratives, Majidi explores the coexistence of dissonants—the digital vs. the physical, the absurd vs. the sensible, and the mundane vs. the extraordinary. Magical realism is a common genre in her works, probing questions about the nature of memories, dreams, and reality. Her works have been showcased at film festivals and galleries around the world, including Vienna Shorts, Mutek AE, Brussels Independent Film Festival, MONSTRA Lisbon Animated Film Festival, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, among others. Majidi holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Shahid Beheshti University.
Liz Oakley is an interdisciplinary artist with a background as a puppeteer. Working within an expanded and queered definition of puppetry, their practice orbits around the animation of objects, materials, sites, and situations. They create performances, events, and installations that playfully engage not only visuality but also tactile and kinesthetic senses, offering open-ended propositions that challenge norms and inject the surreal into the mundane. They are also an arts educator and puppet designer. Originally from New York City, Oakley now resides in Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.
Niloufar Samadi is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and performer whose practice navigates the intersections of identity, memory, intimacy, and the body through the lenses of queerness and feminism. Holding a BFA in Puppet Theatre from Tehran University of Art, Niloufar's early work was rooted in theatre and performance. However, her immigration experience led her to expand her practice into film and visual arts, exploring new mediums to express complex personal and collective narratives. This transition has allowed her to explore the sensory and intimate aspects of visual storytelling, employing techniques that bridge her theatrical background with her newfound passion for analog film and multimedia installation. Her work now encompasses a broad range of forms, challenging traditional boundaries and inviting audiences to engage with themes of intimacy, memory, and representation of female bodies in innovative ways.
Taryn Walker is an award-winning queer, interdisciplinary mixed-Indigenous artist of Nlaka'pamux, Syilx, and European ancestry currently based in the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. Their work explores themes of futurity, spiraling time, utopia, tenderness, playfulness, healing, and cycles of life and death through drawing, printmaking, installation, video, and sound. In 2018 Walker graduated from the University of Victoria's BFA program with a Major in Visual Arts and a Minor in Art History & Visual Studies. Currently, Walker is completing their MFA at SFU in Interdisciplinary Contemporary Arts. Walker’s work has been presented in spaces, residencies, and events across Canada, the United States, and beyond. Notable recent achievements include receiving the SSHRC award (2023), a research residency at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) which included mentoring with Koichi Yamamoto (2024), and an upcoming residency at Arteventura in Spain (2025).
Events
Opening Reception
WED SEP 4 / 6 – 8PM
Audain Gallery
Participatory Events: Kevin Jesuino – Tender City: The Silent Slow Dance Project
WED SEP 4 / 7 – 8PM (during exhibition opening reception)
THU SEP 5 / 1 – 4PM
FRI SEP 6 / 4 – 7PM
SAT SEP 7 / 2 – 3PM (meet in Lobby, then move outdoors)
Lobby, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Performance: Irfan Brkovic – 0x2ė
THU SEP 5 & FRI SEP 6 / 630 and 830PM
Studio T, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Performance Activations: Liz Oakley, Ways to Move a Cloud
The sculpture will be animated for 10 minutes at the following times:
THU SEP 5 / 730PM
FRI SEP 6 / 730PM (with special guests)
THU SEP 12 / 1230 & 3PM
THU SEP 19 / 1230 & 3PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
The Puppet Vision Experience!
SAT SEP 14 / 1 – 4PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Drop by the gallery to try on a pair of Puppet Vision glasses and go on a self-guided Puppet Vision tour.
Gene Draws You as a Cloud
SAT, SEP 21 / 1 – 4PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Drop by the gallery and have Gene draw your portrait as a cloud.
Closing Reception and Artist-led Exhibition Walkthrough
SAT, SEP 21, 4PM
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Support Material
