Dean Baldwin Lew (Montréal, Canada) gambols across media. Toronto-born and Montreal-based, he iterates on themes of hospitality, conviviality, performative still-life, and the structural discrepancies around which we pivot. His practice, which often positions agrarian means within an artworld setting, works to unsettle the structural and social dynamics of a community that privileges its exclusion, its difference. He trades the expected lobster for an invasive crawfish, in River Restaurant; he landlocks a yacht -for the benefit of those without yachts- in Queen West Yacht Club; he fashions Chalet from a museum's previous installation refuse. Moonlighting as host he often passes the bartender's shoulder cloth to friends and visitors, removing himself from its service so others might navigate their newfound work. Applying a palette of aristocracy, he sneaks us in and hoists us up, that we might enjoy the view.

Baldwin has worked in New York, Rome, Tasmania, London & Mumbai, among others.

Lena Cobangbang (Manilla, Philippines) Lena Cobangbang studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman QC. Her work is broad-ranging, moving across video, installation, and found objects to embroidery, cookery, performance and photography. Integral to her art practice is doing collaborations with other artists, such as with Yasmin Sison under the created fictional identity as Alice and Lucinda; and with Mike Crisostomo as The Weather Bureau.

Apart from making art, she writes and works as an independent curator. A part of the seminal artist collective Surrounded By Water, her art practice extends to doing art administration and exhibit organizing, having been a fellow at the 2008 HAO Summit for emerging artists, curator and art managers in Asia in Singapore in 2008, and having undergone an artist/curator research residency exchange between Green Papaya Art Projects and Pekarna Magdalenske Mreze in Maribor, Slovenia in 2010. She was also part of the touring exhibit Bastards of Misrepresentation, curated by Manuel Ocampo which has been held in Berlin, Hamburg, Bangkok and New York and the Manila Vice show in Sete, France.

In 2005, she was nominated for the 3rd Ateneo Art Awards. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2006 and was one of the participating artists in the 2008 Singapore Biennale. She did curatorial projects for galleries Pablo, Post Gallery, Galerie Anna, Galerie Roberto, Art Anton, and Secret Fresh in Manila, Philippines. She was part of a residency program hosted by Langgeng Art Foundation in Jogjakarta in 2016, and is a participant in the first Manila Biennale in 2018.

Kiri Dalena (Manila, Philippines) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose body of work confronts the underlying social conflicts in contemporary Philippine society. Articulating certain realities of injustice and inequality, Dalena’s deep understanding of the mass struggle greatly influences her artistic practice, depicting forms and histories of civil resistance. Her works assert the importance of protest and activism against state persecution. She participated in Berlin Biennale 11: The Crack Begins Within, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, ExRotaprint (2020); JIWA: Jakarta Biennale 2017, Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, Jakarta (2017); and Singapore Biennale: If the World Changed, Singapore Art Museum (2013).

Most recently, for documenta fifteen, a well-traveled protest banner unfurls across the facade of Kassel’s Fridericianum. “STOP THE KILLINGS” is an address by RESBAK (Respond and Break the Silence Against the Killings)—an artists’ collective Dalena co-founded—to organize against former president Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines. Up to 30,000 people have been assassinated by police or died in other extrajudicial action since 2016. The words on the banner, which made its way through protests, are pixelated by mourning pins, traditional black acrylic markers worn by the bereaved.

The interminable waiting for the future is shown in Pila (Lines) (2022), a newly commissioned five-channel video and sound installation made during the pandemic. As the 18-month lockdown continued in the Philippines, food scarcity spread. Community pantries sprung up around the country with the imperative: “Magbigay ayon sa kakayanan, kumuha batay sa pangangailangan” (Give what you’re able to give, and take only what you need). Dalena worked with community members to collect food donations for the table they set up close to her house. The sky turns from night to day as people sit, sleep, talk, and wait for as little as 500 grams of rice. Dalena recorded (with their permission) conversations of those in line, asking them to speak freely of what they normally talk about while waiting—or to continue resting quietly, if they preferred.

Cian Dayrit (Manila, Philippines) is an artist working in painting, sculpture, and installation. His interdisciplinary practice explores colonialism and ethnography, archaeology, history, and mythology. Dayrit subverts the language and workings of institutions such as the state, museums, and the military to understand and visualize the contradictions these platforms and formats are built upon.

His cartographic artworks, often materialized through embroidery, textile, and mixed media collages, plot the patterns of imperialism and feudalism in activities such as the extraction of natural resources and the displacement and exploitation of marginalized populations. At the same time, the works summon new imaginaries that recognize the overlapping struggles and periods of resistance. His multimedia works examine how empire scored out the maps of the modern world, how its aftermath perpetuates industrial development, and how alternative territories might be imagined from the ground-up. Through narratives that expose the inner-workings of imperial power, Dayrit’s work invites us to reconsider how we spatially perceive and interpret the world. While informed by the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the Philippines, Dayrit’s work nonetheless defies being tied to a specific position or location. Instead, his work and research cross over geopolitical and supranational bearings.

Dayrit studied at the University of the Philippines. He has been exhibited in international biennials, including the Sidney Biennial, Gwangju Biennale; Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; New Museum Triennial “Songs for Sabotage” in New York; and Göteborg Biennal. Dayrit has also participated in exhibitions at ParaSite, Hong Kong, Hammer Museum, L.A., the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. In 2019 he was an artist in residence at Gasworks, London.

Erin Gee (Tio’tia:ke – Montréal, Canada) Canadian performance artist and composer takes inspiration from her experience as a vocalist and applies it to poetic and sensorial technologies, likening the vibration of vocal folds to electricity and data across systems, or vibrations across matter.

Gee is a DIY expert in affective biofeedback, implicating the body of the listener as part of her cybernetic systems in place.  Through principles of emotional labour, emotional measurement, emotional performance, and emotional reproduction, she has made work in neural networks, choral composition, ASMR, virtual reality, networked music performance, and robotics foreground issues of critical empathy, unconscious sensory programming, and divisions between emotion and reason.

Gee’s work has been shown in solo exhibition at MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA) and Hamilton Artists’ Inc (CA), and in group exhibitions at Karachi Biennale (PK), Toronto Biennale (CA), MUTEK (AR/ES/CA), LEV Festival (ES), Darling Foundry (CA), NRW Forum (DE), and Ars Electronica (AT). She has performed her music in a solo concert at Vancouver New Music (CA), and has been featured in performance at ISEA 2022 (ES) Akousma Festival (CA), Cluster Festival (CA), and Meta-Marathon Technology Festival (DE).

After earning an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Gee was hired as a Limited-term Assistant Professor at Concordia University (2015-2017) teaching Sound Production, Gender and Technology Studies, and Sound Studies. After teaching part time for several years at University of Maine as an invited scholar in the Bioengineering Department, she is currently a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar and doctoral student in Composition et Création Sonore at Université de Montréal. Her thesis is on feminist frameworks for composing through biofeedback music with thesis advisors Nicolas Bernier (Universite de Montreal) and Jonathan Sterne (McGill University).

Currently, Gee is a long-term artist in residence at the Quantum Institute of Université de Sherbrooke in partnership with Sporobole artist-run centre (CA).

Gee’s artistic research has been featured in neural.it, Scientific American blog, VICE, MusicWorks, and Canadian Art magazine. She has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, as well as support from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.  

Kolown (Cebu, Philippines) works amongst the noise, intervening public spaces with the same vigour as street signs and advertisements. Often Kolown's work hides in plain sight, simultaneously belonging and disrupting the places they inhabit. At home within urban spaces, Kolown's work acts like a glitch in alleys and busy roadsides, calling for a second consideration, pointing at absurdities and punctuating often overlooked bits of contemporary life.

Named after the oldest national road in the Philippines (Colon Street located in Cebu City), Kolown is in reverence to the most diplomatic and accessible of public spaces - the streets. Operating as a mutable collective of artists with strong roots in the graffiti community, Kolown avoids identification, opting instead for anonymity. This affords them the kind of autonomy graffiti artists enjoy, much like their work does within the frenetic visual language of urban environments. This strategy has been effective in focusing on the work — Kolown's subverts by their multiplicity, performing interventions across the archipelagos simultaneously.

Woojae Kim (Vancouver) Woojae Kim (b. Seoul, Korea) is a Korean artist and writer living on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). His works explore rituals of interdependency and listening to inaudible frequencies of relationships with non-humans and the land.

His work has recently been exhibited at Artspeak, Access Gallery in Vancouver, and Dreams Comma Delta in Ladner. His texts were published in the Canadian Art and the Capilano Review. Kim received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award 2023.

A.S.M. Kobayashi (Toronto, Canada and New York City, USA)  is an award winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation, interactive and illustration. Her performance Say Something Bunny! received critical acclaim heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue, was a NYTimes critics’ pick, was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance list in 2018. Kobayashi has received nominations for a 2018 Drama Desk award and 2019 United Solo Special Award and is the recipient of the 2006 TSV Artistic Vision Award. Her video work has been exhibited internationally at both museums, performance and film festivals including; Bilbao International Film Festival, The Western Front (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto) and Pace Digital Gallery (NYC) and Les Subsistances (Lyon). She was a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar. Since 2012 she’s been producing Special Projects at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. There she collaborated on expansive documentary projects like Living Los Sures which New York Film Festival described as “one of the most comprehensive, incredible and in-depth interactive projects that we at the film society have ever seen” and was founding art director of the documentary journal, World Records. 

Okui Lala aka Chew Win Chen (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is an artist and cultural worker whose practice spans from video, performance to community engagement. Okui‘s work explores themes of diaspora, home and belonging through the performances of domestic acts or vocational labour such as sewing, cooking, conversing and building.

Past presentations include shows at Singapore Biennale (2019), Festival/Tokyo (Japan, 2019) , Yamaguchi Art Centre for Arts and Media (Japan, 2019), Para Site (Hong Kong, 2018) and National Art Gallery (Malaysia, 2017) .

In addition to her art practice, Okui teaches multimedia and moving image courses at the Malaysian Institute of Art, and also facilitates photography and video workshops with non-profit organizations and social groups that work with placed-based education and diverse communities. Okui was the recipient of the 2017 Japan Foundation Asia Centre Fellowship Grant for her research on migration, mobilities and identities in Myanmar and Japan.

Okui is currently collaborating with Pertimig Malaysia (Indonesia Migrant Domestic Workers) on a documentary about the domestic workers experiences.

Meredith Talusan (Barryville, NY, USA; she/they) received a Creative Capital Award, MacDowell Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize Special Mention for fiction in 2023; her stories appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Epoch,The Rumpus, Grand, Catapult, and BLR. Her debut memoir, Fairest, was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a best book of the year by multiple venues. She has contributed to ten other books and written articles for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and WIRED among many outlets. She has received journalism awards from GLAAD, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is also the founding executive editor and current contributing editor at them., Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ digital platform.

Sung Tieu (Berlin, Germany) is a German-Vietnamese artist based in Berlin. Her artistic practice spans a variety of mediums including sound, video, sculpture, photography, public interventions and writing. Sung Tieu’s work contends with historiography and analyses the transnational movements of both people and objects. Her practice explores the vast and evolving protection and control industries, still rooted in the logic of the Cold War, used to restrict and mould subjects in subsequently globalized capitalism. Informed by her own experience of cultural collision and displacement, her work critically investigates the art-historical legacies of late Modernism.

Using diverse artistic mediums ranging from installation, sound, video, text, sculpture, photography, performance to public interventions, her practice navigates the diasporic experiences of temporal slippage and spatial uncertainty. Within her exhibitions, a sense of dislocation is evoked through a combination of sonic, visual, and textual elements; at the same time, her extensive research on sonic weaponry and sound as medium accentuates the work, demystifying and highlighting their material mechanics. Although based in research, her exhibitions deliberately resist any singular discursive rendering, and instead give rise to layered narrative readings.

Since 2016, Tieu has been engaged in a critical examination of psychological and bureaucratic warfare — their histories and effects—to uncover the socio-political and ideological mechanisms undergirding geo-political agendas. This interest resulted in video and sound installations such as In Cold Print (2020), Song for Unattended Items (2018) and Remote Viewing (2017). In these works, Tieu proposes that the legacy of a Cold War threat continues to propagate—that there is a persistent state of mitigated catastrophe dispersed within and contaminating our everyday realities, the alleviation of which is premised on differentiating signal from noise and the benign from the malignant. In installations such as Zugzwang (2020) and What is your |x|? (2020), and her series Newspapers 1969 - ongoing (2017 - ongoing), Tieu examines the culture of information and its institutionalised dynamics of transmission in our societies—whether through newspaper columns or astrological interpretations.

Maylee Todd (Los Angeles, USA) is a Filipino-Canadian independent musician, performance artist and producer. Todd released her first solo album, Choose Your Own Adventure, in 2010, and her second record, Escapology, in 2013. Both were released on the Do Right Music label. "Baby's Got It" reached number 10 on the Tokio Hot 100 chart. She has had much success in Japan and has performed on the Billboard Live Stage and CrossOver Jazz Fest. Todd is signed to Stones Throw Records and released her fourth album, Maloo on March 4, 2022.

Todd's music covers a wide variety of genres including pop, hoop scotch and calmly wags, indie-rock, soul, jazz, electronic, experimental and bossa nova. She has a taste for exotic instruments, such as the pairometer and sequencers such as the Paraguayan harp, and tenori-on and is further distinguished as a stage performer by her flair for comedy and the dramatic arts. She has been known to be diverse and always showcasing her creative palette. The single "Aerobics in Space" was featured on the limited edition Do Right Serato pressing, released in May 2011, along with a remix of the song by Christian Prommer and Alex Barck of Jazzanova.

In 2017, Todd created Virtual Womb, a visual and auditory show where the audience walks through a large vagina and lies on the floor, watching the projections that are on the ceiling.

Todd has shared the stage with numerous well-known Canadian and international artists, including Janelle Monáe, Esthero, Aloe Blacc, Thundercat, Charles Bradley, and The Budos Band. In July 2011, she performed at the Canadian Blast showcase at the Barbican in London, England. She contributes vocals on Bob Wiseman's 2012 release Giulietta Masina at the Oscars Crying.

Mama’s Boy (Tanya & Olive Villanueva) (Manila, Philippines) are a mother daughter collective. Although they have been making art collaboratively for some time, they have more recently formalized their collective practice through a dual residency at the renowned Akademie Schloss Solitude, (Stuttgart, Germany), commenced upon Olive’s graduation from secondary school. Foundational topics in their work are mental health and wellness, conditions for survival, mutual care and aid, expanding the applications and definitions of beauty and reclaiming cultural consciousness and Filipino roots through the decolonization of artistic practice.

Tanya holds a BA in fine arts with a major in painting from The University of the Philippines in Quezon City/Philippines (2016). Her work has evolved from the investigation and production of art objects through a lens of painting, craft, and photography to an exploration of the performance and nature of this cultural labor through the use of photography, video installations and collaborations. Her work has been shown at the Vargas Museum in Manila, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila, 856G Gallery in Cebu City/Philippines (2018/2019), Artspeak Gallery Vancouver/Canada and Yucca, in San Francisco/USA. Olive has been developing her drag practice, performing in-person and live on Instagram as @oliverghouled. 

Xuan Ye (Toronto, Canada) makes publications, installations and performances through a myriad of technologies, often involving improvisation and computation. They work with more-than-human networks such as the Internet, machine intelligence, electronic circuits and living matters to experiment with multi-sensory world-building. 

Their most recent exhibition, It Takes Spirals to Feed The Spiral (2022) at MOCA Toronto blurs the boundaries of the physical and the virtual, reimagines conceptions of time and space, and presents their ongoing research into spirals as an archetype. The multi-media installation looks at how spirals repeat themselves in the smallest components of life and the largest forces in our universe; in their practice Ye refers to nanoscopic imagery that reveals the double helix structure in DNA, and telescopes that make visible the spiral formations of galaxies. They have exhibited across Canada including MOCA Toronto, Bunker 2, InterAccess, Centre Clark (Montreal) as well as internationally including Birmingham, Beijing, Guangzhou, New York City, Malmö, and Stockholm. Recent awards include EQ Bank Emerging Digital Artists Award and SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Ye holds an MFA from York University, and a MA in Media Culture and Communication from New York University.