Artistic Positions and Entanglements: A Dialogue about Global Souths in Global Norths

What has been the impact of recent social justice movements, decolonizing methodologies, and the new field of critical race museology on the role of the curator? Rooting our conversation in this question, we seek to understand the overlapping impacts of multiple crises as they continue to unfold on BIPOC diasporic artists. In this conversation with artist Sharleena Bamboat and curator Haema Sivanesan, moderated by Rajee P. Jejishergill, we focus on diasporic artistic practices, both on an individual level, as well as institutional. We probe and try to critically understand the role that artistic run centres play for racialized artists, and the whether they still hold relevance today.

Haema Sivanesan (she/her) (Director, Leighton Studios and Program Partnerships, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity) has held leadership and curatorial positions in public art galleries, artist-run centres and festivals around the world. Her curatorial work focuses on non-western, post-colonial and transnational art histories. In 2018, she was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York, Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Sharlene Bamboat (sher/her) is a moving image and installation artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her practice engages with translation, history, and sound to uncover sensory and fractured ways of understanding the relationship between the self and the social in transnational contexts. She collaborates frequently with artists, musicians, writers and artist-run collectives and organisations. 

Rajee Paña Jejishergill (she/her) is an artist and educator of Punjabi-Filipinx descent born in Treaty1/Winnipeg and currently based in K'jipuktuk/Halifax. Through textiles, sound, still and moving images, Rajee creates autoethnographic explorations reflecting the ways in which histories of colonialism shape hybrid identities, as well as revisiting familial stories and skills to investigate intergenerational inheritance and diasporic subjectivity and emotionality.