Sobey Art Award – Ontario
Rajni Perera
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The work of Sri Lanka-born artist Rajni Perera explores diasporic mythology through the lens of science fiction. Drawing upon her own rich visual experience of immigrant culture, and her environmental concerns arising from colonialism and the ravages of capitalist-driven resource extraction, she imagines an off-world that is triumphant.
The Toronto-based artist has exhibited at venues around the world, including Tramway in Glasgow, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, the Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka, and Art League Houston.
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko
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Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko have worked in collaboration since 2013. Their shared practice explores the tension of multiple subjectivities to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to decode their surroundings, while disrupting the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery.
Shifting between both gallery and cinematic contexts, their recent projects have been presented at the Viennale, the Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and other international venues.
Jawa El Khash
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Jawa El Khash is an artist, technologist and researcher. She uses technology (VR and holography) as a philosophical medium to play on the poetics of the everyday nature of living in the world.
The ecosystems she builds expand the horizons of our worldview, along with the objects and life that occupy these spaces. Through the peripheral and ephemeral qualities of technology, El Khash creates replicas of reality that blur the line between the real and the simulated, the fictional and the factual, the original and the copy.
Tanya Lukin Linklater
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Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances, videos, installations and writings work through orality and embodiment, investigating the histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. She explores insistence in both concept and application, and often produces performances in relation to objects in exhibitions, scores and cultural belongings.
Her work has been shown at venues that include ICA (Virginia Commonwealth University), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Remai Modern, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Her work was to be included in Our Bodies, Our Archives, the BMW Tate Live Exhibition 2020 in London, which was cancelled due to COVID-19. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.
Horse Hair Question 1, 2016, horsehair bundles, cotton string, antler velvet, nails, American ash wood, American cherry wood, brass screws, steel screws, steel mesh screens, drywall, steel studs, dimensions variable. © Tanya Lukin Linklater — Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
He was a poet and he taught us how to react and to become this poetry, Parts 1 and 2, 2016, video projection on custom performance plinth, tutus. Performance view from Le Grand Balcon, La Biennale de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. © Tanya Lukin Linklater — Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Photo: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Esmaa Mohamoud
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Esmaa Mohamoud is a Toronto-based African-Canadian artist. She holds a B.F.A. from Western University (2014), and an M.F.A. from OCAD University (2016). Mohamoud has recently exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the gallery at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.
Her major solo exhibition, To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, organized by Museum London, is touring to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery through 2023. Her work is also included in Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
