Leila Sujir

Leila Sujir is an artist and professor emerita at Concordia University in the Intermedia (Video, Performance, Electronic Arts) area. She is working on new 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 installation in-progress, places the viewer in a forest of pixels; 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.

A large format video art commission, Aerial, an artistic experiment with IMAX technologies, commissioned by curator Janine Marchessault for Outer Worlds, with the work of four other artists (Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, and Michael Snow) and supported by a Canada Council New Chapter grant, launched in Toronto April 18, 2019 at the Cinesphere IMAX at the closing night of the Images festival, was exhibited in Montreal Fall 2023, as part of "Thinking Allowed" project (Thursday, October 19th, at the Montreal Science Centre IMAX theatre) and screened at Queen's University in Kingston, March 7, 2024 @ 6:30 pm with a panel following, March 8th, 2024. During the summer, it screened at a music festival, Westben, in Northumberland, Ontario (July 17 evening, 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 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 for an IMAX screening Thursday, October 19 of the artists' projects Outer Worlds (with curator Janine Marchessault, York University). 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).

-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).

NEWS

-Preview of forest documents, a video installation (54 minutes) with an adjacent reading room: Monday, September 9, 2024, Concordia University, Montréal, in the EV Black Box (sub-basement 3), 1 pm to 6 pm; April 2025, Wildwood, Ecoforestry Institute Society, near Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, B.C. 

-Screening at Queen's University of Aerial, in Outer Worlds experiments by artists, March 7th evening, 2024, followed by a panel the afternoon of March 8th, 2024; screening at the Westben music festival in Northumberland, Ontario, the evening of July 17, 2024.

-Exhibition screening of Peacocks Dream (2018) in the group show, "Those That Came Before Us," curated by Anastasia Ferguson, June 15 - September 2023, MacKenzie Art Gallery.

-Thinking Allowed: a series of public panels, screenings, events and publications taking place March - October 2023, funded by SSHRC Connection, with the support of Concordia University and the Elastic Spaces network and partners that include: UQAM; Montreal Botanical Garden/University of Montreal; York University; Queen's University; Emily Carr University of Art Design; Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee; and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

-Taking place for a week starting June 12, 2023, on CFMDC, as part of Thinking Allowed, the streaming of the 2021 series, SuperWomen: Conversations with the Real Action Figures is a collection of interviews with seven astounding women who have an extensive history of working in film and video. During the first wave of identity politics, multiculturalism, and at the tail end of the second feminist wave in the late 1980s/early 1990s, there were an increasing number of women artists and filmmakers who explored media production as a creative tool to tell their stories. Across genres, in front and behind the camera, these global voices firmly established an independent filmmaking foundation whose spirit has continued to inspire the next generations.

-Exhibition screening of Forest Breath (2018) March 13, 2023, 1 pm, EV Black Box, S3-845, as part of the Sustainability Conference:

https://www.concordia.ca/cuevents/artsci/loyola-college/2023/03/13/forest-breath.html

-Panel: "Climate Change Across Disciplines," March 13, 4th Space, 2:00- 4:00 pm as part of the Sustainability Conference:

https://www.concordia.ca/cuevents/artsci/loyola-college/2023/03/13/climate-change-across-disciplines.html

https://www.youtube.com/live/8yMiMG6maac?feature=share

-Panel:"West Coast Rainforest Activist Movements: current moments and reflections on decades of activism," March 14, 2023, 4th Space, 1:00 pm - 3 pm as part of the Sustainability Conference: