Babak Golkar is a Canadian artist, working and living in Vancouver, Canada. Born in Berkeley, US, 1977.

He spent most of his formative years in Tehran until 1996 when he moved to Canada. He obtained a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2006 and has exhibited in venues internationally since graduating. Selected solo exhibitions and presentations include All The Blind Men. Servais Family Collection, Brussels, Belgium (2019), The Exchange Project (La Collection Imaginaire), INCA, Seattle, U.S.A. (2016); Of Labour, Of Dirt, Sazmanab, Tehran, Iran (2014); Time To Let Go…, Vancouver Art Gallery: Offsite, Vancouver, Canada (2014); Dialectic of Failure, West Vancouver Museum, West Vancouver, Canada (2013); Parergon, Sharjah Contemporary Art Museum, Sharjah, U.A.E. (2012) and Mechanisms of Distortion, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K. (2012).

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Waqas Khan is a Pakistani artist, that lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan. Born in Akhtarabad, Pakistan, in 1982.

Waqas Khan’s large scale minimalist drawings resemble webs and celestial expanses. The contemplation leaving a visible evidence on paper is the crux of the work.

Khan employs small dashes and minuscule dots to create large entanglements. Where when two particle-sque units are spread out and entangled, they are essentially ‘in sync’ with each other, and they’ll stay in sync no matter how far apart they are. This idea of togetherness and being seen one as a magnanimous totality is what he partly absorbs from his inclination towards literature and interest in the lives of sufi poets. Khan’s work also evoke a sense of scripting, which he likes to see as a discourse between him and his viewer, a dialogue which is very much formatted over the syntax of a monologue.

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Manal AlDowayan is a Saudi artist, living and working in Dubai, UAE and Dahran, Saudi Arabia. Born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1973. Embracing diverse media, Manal AlDowayan’s work encompasses black and white photography, sculpture, video, sound, neon and large-scale participatory installations. Her artistic practice revolves around themes of active forgetting, archives, and collective memory, with a large focus on the state of Saudi women and their representation.

She has documented social groups like the oil men and women of Saudi Arabia in her project, If I Forget You Don’t Forget Me, and has addressed the impact of mass media on propagating intentional erasing of identities in her project Crash, highlighting the unnamed Saudi teachers dying in car crashes across Saudi Arabia. Her participatory projects have attracted hundreds of women to use art as a new platform to address social injustice like Tree of Guardians, Esmi-My Name, and Suspended Together.

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Jong Oh's artistic practice is quite particular since he does not use a studio but creates minimal sculptures in situ that respond to a given spatial situation. Responding to the nuanced configuration of each site, the artist constructs spatial structures by suspending and interconnecting a limited selection of materials: rope, chains, fishing wire, perspex, wooden and metal rods and painted threads. The elements of the work seem to float, and depending on the spatial relationship of the viewer with it these elements are connected and cross each other or appear as absolutely independent, suggesting additional dimensions to the simple three-dimensional space. 

Oh appeals to the viewer to question their own perception and the way they have to relate to the space that surrounds them, offering a space for meditation and contemplation before the hustle and bustle of contemporary everyday life: a subtle and refined visual haiku about universality and the sound of space.

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Mónica de Miranda is an artist and researcher. Born in Porto (Portugal) from Angolan parents, she actually describes herself as an artist working in the diaspora. Her work is based on themes of urban archaeology and personal geographies.

She holds a Visual Arts Degree from the Camberwell College of Arts, a Master’s Degree in Art and Education from the Institute of Education London and a PhD in Visual Art from the University of Middlesex. Mónica is also one of the founders of the artistic residences project Triangle Network in Portugal and she founded in 2014 the project Hangar Center for Artistic Research, in Lisbon.

In 2016 she was nominated for Novo Banco Photo Prize and exhibited at Museu Coleção Berado (Lisbon, Portugal) as finalist. Mónica was also nominated for Prix Pictet Photo Award in the same year.

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Hyunsoo Lee’s works are inspired by themes of social stigma, identity, psychological disorders, and more recently, of spirituality and religion. He explores these themes through a novel vector – paintings and sculptures consisting largely of cell-like marks that vary in size, color, and saturation. His works are seen as ethereal and delicate, but the extremely labor-intensive compositions, marked by intensely obsessive repetitions, quickly betray that initial perception. Exploring his own history of anxiety disorders through his art, Timothy confronts and manipulates his tics and compulsions and channels them into his works. In responding to his anxiety with art, he has developed a novel system of mind-mapping – “a cartography of his psychopathology” – to study a part of himself that initially drew him to study developmental biology and neuroscience in college.

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Gabriela Bettini's current interests lie in the study of the first cultural colonialisation and how it relates to its present-day legacy. Using the history of painting and the representation of landscape as her point of departure – observing how this medium has been used to reinforce the ideas that form the basis of Western hegemony – she analyses today’s environmental crisis and the extractivist model it espouses, one where women become a paradigm of the multiple violence inflicted by climate change.

In her works, she studies life experiences existing in the margins of History, revealing the voids that result when we attempt to reconcile memory, memory politics and official narratives. Gabriela Bettini explores these intermediate spaces, paying attention to the traces left behind by certain personal experiences. She is interested in the elements which seem to be symbolising that passage between realities, an interstitial condition which can be seen as a metaphor for the liminality, openness and ambiguity of those who have experienced them.

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Joël Andrianomearisoa’s background as an architect, Malagasy origins and profound interest in arts, define a very particular way of work, mostly playing with spaces and feelings. The emotive intelligence and sensuality of his art works made him the perfect candidate to represent his country at the Venice Biennial, win the Prize Audemars Piget or be part of public colections and museums around the World. Emotions are Andrianomearisoa’s main brush, along with the fabrics, silk papers, or any other raw materials he uses in the process. And so on, the artist creates labyrinths, landscapes, cartographies of desires or spaces also invaded by full poetry such as Inventories of the Present or Tomorrow, Tomorrow…

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Karakashian’s artworks stems from her personal and family history and reflects on current issues of exile, migration and refugee-statues. Process and materiality is key to her practice. Employing used engine oil and salt as a medium for painting, she engages in ecological discussion, the threatening instability and subtle collapse; and the unethical seizing of rapidly dwindling natural resources, particularly on the resource-rich African continent. Furthermore she investigates notions of mourning – both of an individual and collective nature – and the lamentation of the loss of land and of those who have been ‘unhomed’.

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Dagoberto’s works have been exhibited in museums and cultural institutions around the world and are part of prominent public collections such as MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern and Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, among many others.

Combining architecture, design and sculpture, his work employs humor and irony to comment on core topics in art, politics and society. Watercolor forms a very important part of his creative process, it is a way of registering and revising his ideas. Often these works reflect a fantasy of a possible conceptual situation.

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