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Leila Sujir

Pronouns: She/Her

  • Professor Emeritus, Intermedia (Video, Performance and Electronic Arts), EV1-631, Studio Arts

status: professor emeritus

Research areas: media arts; social justice; embodied interaction; stereoscopic 3D video; spatialized audio; installation; archive and memory; race and digital space; migration; the environment and sustainability

Contact information

Biography

Areas of expertise

Video Art / Video Installation

NEWS

Preview of forest documents, a video installation (56 minutes) with an adjacent reading room: 

Monday, March 17, 2025 at Concordia University's 4th Space, in the Insite2, Sustainability Across the Disciplines, at 4th Space, 4:15 pm - 6:00 pm; 

Saturday, April 26, 2025, Wildwood, Ecoforestry Institute Society, near Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, B.C., details to follow.


Mini retrospective at the Lethbridge Independent Film Festival (LIFF) with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), upcoming April 11-13, 2025 with an announcement coming soon, about the Southern Alberta Art Gallery's premiere of forest documents (Summer Fall 2025).


Upcoming Canadian screenings of Aerial with Outer Worlds, 2025-2026, with curator Janine Marchessault, at IMAX theatres in Victoria, BC; Edmonton, Alberta; and in Ottawa, Ontario at a large screen cinema (details to be announced).  


Publication of "The Bloom of Matter, 1979–1981" from a previously unpublished 1986 essay, and "Shaping Matter, 1990–1991" in the catalogue book for the exhibition, Joyce Wieland: Heart On, with book editors|curators Anne Grace & Georgiana Uhlyarik at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and Art Gallery of Ontario with Goose Lane editions, February 2025.



Leila Sujir is an artist and professor emerita at Concordia University in the Intermedia (Video, Performance, Electronic Arts) area of the Studio Arts department in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She has recently completed a new body of work, with video projections: one on the forests near Port Renfrew on the west coast of Canada that she has received a Canada Council for the Arts Concept to Realization grant (2022), for forest documents. She is also continuing her focus on migration.

forest documents, a stereoscopic 3D video sculptural video installation in-progress with a 60 minute cycle, places the viewer in a forest of pixels with a reading room; it is in preview now, towards an upcoming exhibition in 2025, with  a recent publication on this body of work in Journal of Transcultural Studies, March 2021.

Aerial, a large format video art commission by curator Janine Marchessault for Outer Worlds, an artistic experiment with IMAX technologies, will tour across Canada in 2025-2026 with the work of four other artists (Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, and Michael Snow) supported by a Canada Council Touring grant.  The project launched in Toronto April 18, 2019 at the Cinesphere IMAX at the closing night of the Images festival, was exhibited in Montreal October 19, 2023, as part of the Thinking Allowed project at the Montreal Science Centre IMAX theatre, and screened at Queen's University in Kingston, March 7, 2024, and screened at the Westben music festival, in Northumberland, Ontario, July 17, 2024.


Leila Sujir is the principal investigator of a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, Elastic Forest Spaces (2024), and a SSHRC Connection grant, Thinking Allowed (2022).  The Thinking Allowed project launched March 13, 2023 within the Concordia University Sustainability Conference, continued June 12-16 at 4th Space Concordia and October 19-21, with 4th Space Concordia, the Montreal Botanical Garden, and the Montreal Science Centre. Previous SSHRC grants include a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Elastic 3D Spaces: Bodies and Belonging (2016-2019).


From 2017 to 2022, she was chair of the Studio Arts Department, in the Faculty of Fine Arts.


In 2005-2006, Sujir was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Calgary, a one year research position as an artist in the Interactions Lab in the Department of Computer Science. Starting in 2011, she began working with Montreal-based Janro's Sandde 3D drawing tool, as the lead researcher on two grants investigating its potential as a performance, drawing, and sculptural tool (CINQ/Mitacs). She has been an artist in residence at the Bath School of Art, at Bath Spa University in the UK (2014-2015) where she developed a stereoscopic video projection for a building facade, Elastic City Spacey (January 2015). She was also an artist in residence at the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia (June 2013) where she presented at the International Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA), and was an artist in residence at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia (July 2012), as well as being an artist in residence at the Banff Centre (Fall 2013|Winter 2014, and  most recently, at the Leighton Studios in Summer 2023).

 

Sujir’s video works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, U.K. as well as galleries and festivals all over the world. New Republics, a group exhibition out of the U.K. toured Canada and Australia 1999-2000 (in Australia to Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts; University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide; Canberra School of Art; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; in Canada to Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; and beginning in the U.K. at Canada House, London). A solo exhibition that has toured galleries in Canada, Luminous Stories, initiated by the Art Gallery of Peterborough, covering ten years of her video art production, toured to A Space, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Southern Art Gallery and University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.

 

Select publications on Sujir's art work include the following:

-India Hearts Beat and Forest Breath from the Surrey Art Gallery, TechLab: Experiments in Media Art 1999-2019 (2022).

-Peacocks Dream in a book on Indian art, Moving Focus: Art From India Since 1900 (2022), edited by Mortimer Chatterjee, a guide to Indian modern and contemporary art, featuring over 250 works chosen by a group of 50 curator/contributors, each creating a list of five works (2022).

-an essay by curator Haema Sivanesan in Journal of Transcultural Studies, “Unsettling the Picturing of the Canadian Old Growth Forest: Consent, Consultation and (Re)conciliation in Leila Sujir's Forest!" (2021):

https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/24248/17987

 -essays by curators Nancy Tousley and Haema Sivanesan in Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980’s, a book from the Art Gallery of Alberta, edited by Lindsey Sharman (2020).
-a chapter of a book by curator Nancy Tousley, "Leila Sujir’s forest of pixels,”  in  Intertwined Histories: Plants in Their Social Contexts from the University of Calgary Institute for the Humanities (2019).

 -curators Sunil Gupta and Steve Evans' book from the Houston, Texas Fotofest Biennial: India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art  (2018). 
-curator and editor Srimoyee Mitra’s book, Border Cultures (2016).  
-curators Katherine Ylitalo and Nancy Tousley, with editor Melanie Kjorlien’s book, Made in Calgary: An Exploration of Art from 1960 to the 2000’s (2016).




2-channel video installation, with large format stereoscopic 3D and 2D video projections mounted on alternate sides of a free-standing wall, with a reading room within the space of the 2D projection. 60 minute cycle, spatialized audio.

Technical Director: Jorge Zavagno. Reading Room in collaboration with artist-librarian John Latour.

Teaching activities


Studio Arts, professor emeritus

Research activities

Aerial (2019), to tour 2025-2026 in Canada, with screenings by Outer Worlds, in IMAX theatres in Victoria, BC and Edmonton Alberta, and in Ottawa, ON, in a large screen theatre. A commission by curator, Janine Marchessault, with with works by Lisa Jackson, Oliver Husain, Kelly Richardson, Micheal Snow, and Leila Sujir

9 minutes, spatialized (IMAX) audio 
(Drone mounted with an 8k RED camera and cable cam rig for the ambisonic audio)

A west coast rain forest seen through a camera mounted on a drone, moving rapidly as if it were a humming bird: it hovers, then zigzags horizontally, then vertically. Spatial microphones mounted on a cablecam up in the tree canopy move across the Emerald Pool in the south Walbran, not far from the bridge. Four white embossed still forest landscapes extend the possibility of inner spaces, for us to step back into ourselves, to contemplate, and to engage with the memory, recording and healing process, while we view, together, this airborne sequence, exploring a forest.

Aerial, 2019, Outer Worlds commission

Publications

Research Activities


  RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS SINCE 2018

Published proceedings, book chapters, contributions to a collective  work:

-Sujir, Leila, "The Bloom of Matter, 1979–1981" from a previously unpublished 1986 essay, and "Shaping Matter, 1990–1991" in the catalogue book for the exhibition, Joyce Wieland: Heart On, with curators|editors Anne Grace & Georgiana Uhlyarik. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and Art Gallery of Ontario with Goose Lane editions, 2025.

-Sujir, Leila, with Anthony Head, “Exploring art, technology, research methodologies and the human in virtual, augmented and mixed realities or: how a research project, Elastic 3D Spaces, emerged from an outdoor projection event,” Practices of Projection (editors: Gabriel Menotti & Virginia Crisp), Oxford University Press, 2020.


Creative outputs – art projects: 

2025 forest documents, 60 minute cycle, stereoscopic 3D (S3D) sculptural video installation with a reading room, in preview stage Spring 2025, with solo exhibition premiere, upcoming Summer |Fall 2025with curator Adam Whitford.

2019, Aerial, a 9 minute video IMAX artwork, commissioned for a series of large screen artistic IMAX experiments by curator Janine Marchessault for a Canada Council New Chapter project; the project uses a large format drone simulating the flight paths of a hummingbird through the South Walbran old growth forests (8k camera with ambisonic sound and cablecam rigging to take ambisonic microphones into the forest canopy).

2018, Peacocks Dream, Elastic City Spacey, a 2-channel stereoscopic 3D video projection, for exhibition with curators Steven Evans and Sunil Gupta at the Houston FotoFest Biennial: India — Contemporary Photography and New Media Art (March – April 2018).

2018, Forest Breath, a stereoscopic video lightbox, for exhibition with curator Haema Sivanesan in the group exhibition, ”Supernatural: Art, Technology, and the Forest,”  at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (May 18-September 30).

       

Participation activities

Outer Worlds, "A new touring project of commissioned IMAX shorts pushes the boundaries of a medium usually reserved for commercial, action cinema." From Canadian Art, May 23, 2019

https://canadianart.ca/reviews/outer-worlds/

"Into the Woods," a review by John Luna, Canadian Art magazine, June 6, 2018, on the exhibition, Supernatural: Art, Technology and the Forest

https://canadianart.ca/reviews/into-the-woods/

"Four of FotoFest's dazzling displays focus on Indian portraiture," by Molly Glentzer in the Houston Chronicle, April 13, 2018, a review of the FotoFest Biennale India Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/arts-theater/article/Four-of-FotoFest-s-dazzling-displays-focus-on-12833095.php

Blog post from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria for community screening in Rort Renfrew, August 2018

https://aggv.ca/forest-breath-a-portrait-in-progress/

Blog post from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria on screening of "For Jackson"

http://emagazine.aggv.ca/aggv-honours-black-history-month-documentary-leila-sujir/

Exhibitions

The Dreams of the Night Cleaners

* The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (excerpt), 1995.

Video, 46 minutes, Collections: The Glenbow Museum and Archives, and the National Gallery of Canada.

A road trip, a journey, a voyage through history and memory. A complex weave of drama, archival footage and animation in a fable format to explore the public mythologies in our culture which have had devastating effects on public policy, public attitudes and individual lives. "Dreams" uses storytelling, humour, magic and history to sweep away the misconceptions which haunt the lives of its characters.

The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995)

This work will be exhibited in a mini retrospective at the Lethbridge Independent Film Festival (LIFF) in partnership with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (April 11-13, 2025), with an exhibition premiere upcoming (to be announced).

It was in the traveling exhibition New Republics with artists from Canada, South Africa and Australia, curated by Sunil Gupta (1999-2000).

It was programmed in the Doxa festival in Vancouver, May 2019, in the program, 
Longing and Belonging: 1990s South Asian Film and Video, curated by Zool Suleman.
 
https://www.doxafestival.ca/essay-longing-and-belonging-1990s-south-asian-film-and-video
 

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