Presenting Artists
Amed Aroche
Amed Aroche (b. Cuba) is an artist, researcher, and independent curator based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. With a background in Architecture and a Masters in Social Science, his practice merges research, photography, installation, and writing to explore the intersection of politics and poetics in contemporary life. His work has been exhibited in Havana, Montreal, and Vienna. A 2024 démART-Mtl 2024 fellow offered by the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, he is currently part of the team at the Centre d'art et de diffusion CLARK, curating a group exhibition for the summer of 2025.
Sarah Madgin
As a visual artist, Sarah Madgin works with printmaking and alternative photography techniques to recontextualize personal and found archives in exploring memory formation. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Visual and Media Art from the University of Quebec in Montreal, she received the Albert‑Dumouchel Prize, BMO First Art! Prize, and the CALQ Montreal Emerging Artist Award. In 2019, Madgin participated in research‑creation printmaking residencies at Engramme (Quebec) and Zocalo (Longueuil). Invested in Canada’s collaborative printmaking scene, she has worked with Jillian Ross Print on William Kentridge’s live editions The Greater Yes, The Greater No, and contributed notably to editions by Shuvinai Ashoona, Takao Tanabe, and Rebecca Belmore as a printer assistant at New Leaf Editions in Vancouver. Her work has been showcased in exhibitions across Canada, including La Maison des arts de Laval (2023), UQAM Gallery (2019), and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto (2018).
Zaynab Ghaïs-Mortada
Zaynab Ghaïs-Mortada is a visual artist from Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, interested in the questions of time, the 'uneventful', memory, opacity and corporeity. Her work has been featured in publications such as Périphérie, What Makes a Lake? Tracing Movement and Macaroni. She is also a farmer with over a decade of experience tending orchards, flower gardens and edible gardens on the island, as well as a researcher whose work lies at the intersections of phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, epistemology, and Québec history and politics.
Zanne Vandelaer
Zanne Vanderlaer is a visual artist and final-year Philosophy major at McGill University, with a minor in Psychology. Born to Nepali and Belgian parents, her upbringing spans Switzerland, New York, Nepal, Victoria, and Montreal—an experience that shapes her perspective and informs her creative approach. Working primarily with analogue photography, her practice is rooted in observation, introspection, and a desire to connect. She is currently exploring ways to merge her passion for visual storytelling with her academic interests in thought, perception, and identity.
Guest Reviewers
Tamara Abdul Hadi
Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer and educator investigating the links between photography and representations of culture.
Along with being a photographer, Tamara is an educator who has taught in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Tunisia and Canada.
Her work has been published in the mainstream media extensively, though she now prefers to work for more independent entities. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide.
Abdul Hadi's debut monograph Picture an Arab Man was published in 2022.
María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
María Andreína Escalona De Abreu is a Venezuelan visual artist, writer, independent curator, and arts worker based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She obtained a BFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University in 2022 and has since been developing her curatorial practice notably as the Exhibition Coordinator of the FOFA Gallery. Escalona's practice brings together curation, collaborative initiatives, creative writing, textile installations, and handmade paper as ways of dreaming, confabulating and applying notions of sustainability, community development, and advocacy for equity in the arts. Escalona’s work is a “tough-love” letter to her Venezuelan roots and Canadian present.
naakita f.k.
naakita f.k. is an interdisciplinary artist based between Zhegagoynak/Chicago and Tio’Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Through place-based and site-specific relations, they consider extractivism, including both resource extraction and extractive ideologies that show up in the wake of violence to land. Working through multimedia installation, their research uses hauntology to explore the impacts of the colonial project on built and natural environments, while imagining possible futures that can be contained in a haunted place. This practice is rooted in creating modes of listening to landscapes and the human and other-than-human-beings that inhabit them.
f.k. has shown their work nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012); Trinity Square Video, Toronto, ON (2016); Mémoire de l'Avenir, Paris, FR (2019); Videofenster, Cologne, DE (2021); Fonderie Darling, Montreal, QC (2022); Images Festival, Toronto, ON (2023); Centre CLARK, Montreal, QC (2024); and CAFKA, Kitchener, ON (2025).