Shelly Bahl is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator and decolonizing art trailblazer. She has been leading and participating in BIPOC and feminist artist-run culture in Toronto and NYC for over 25 years. She is a founding artist member of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and ZEN-MIX 2000: Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network in Toronto. She was the inaugural director of SAVAC from 1997-1999.

Bahl was born in Benares, India, and is currently based in New York City. Bahl received her BFA (Visual Art and Art History) from York University, Toronto and her MA (Studio Art) from New York University. Her interdisciplinary work in drawing, painting, sculpture/ installation, performance, photography and video has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally. Currently, she is the Visiting Artist/ Co-Curator of the Be(Coming) The Museum project at the Lahore Museum in Pakistan.

Her art practice explores the strange and surreal aspects of cultural hybridity and old and new forms of colonization. She is interested in the global transmission of iconographies and other forms of visual culture. She also investigates the surrealistic experiences of women who lead enigmatic trans-cultural lives. These narratives are based in facts and fictions rooted in specific cultural histories, which she then re-contextualizes and re-imagines.

Farheen Haq is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who has been living on unceded Lekwungen territory (Victoria, BC) for 20 years. She was born and raised on Haudenosanee territory (Niagara region, Ontario) amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her multidisciplinary practice which often employs video, installation and performance is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Farheen’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Canadian territories, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.

She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally. Farheen received her BA in International Development (1998) from the University of Toronto, her BEd (2000) from the University of Ottawa and her MFA in Visual Arts (2005) from York University. In 2014, Farheen was nominated for Canada’s pre-eminent Sobey Art Award.

Jordan Strom has been curating exhibitions, writing, and publishing on contemporary art for the past two decades on the unceded land of the Coast Salish and Interior Salish nations. Prior to working at Surrey Art Gallery, he curated exhibitions and art projects for Presentation House Gallery (now Polygon Gallery), Kamloops Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, xeno/dadabase and Republic Gallery. In 2004, he was one of the founders of the Fillip Journal of Contemporary Art which published articles and writing on contemporary art. He has been working as the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at Surrey Art Gallery since 2009. More recently he has been researching and writing on Canadian media arts in the 1980s as part of a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Zool Suleman is an advocate, writer, and cultural collaborator. He is the Editor of Rungh and the Executive Director of the Rungh Cultural Society.