ARTISTS’ TALK WITH NINA LEO & MOEZ SURANI OVER ZOOM!
AT 7:30PM ON THURSDAY, APRIL 1ST, 2021
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89471222884?pwd=R2l0YlQ1ZDJ6QkkrVU9rS3BaQ0dJQT09
Meeting ID: 894 7122 2884
Passcode: 803274
Images courtesy of Moez Surani
STEVEN MATIJCIO is the Director and Chief Curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Prior to this he served as Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio (2013-2019) and Curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (2008-2013). Matijcio achieved an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York and an HBA from the University of Toronto. He has held positions in a number of important galleries and museums including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada.
NINA LEO is a Canadian cross-disciplinary artist. She has shown her work in galleries and public institutions internationally, including the Beyond/ In Western N.Y. 2010 Bi-ennial, Kunsthaus Santa Fe (Mexico), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), The Lobby Gallery (Chicago), New Zero Arts Space (Yangon) and Al Fanoun Gallery (Abu Dhabi). She has received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and The Ontario Arts Council as well as the 2013 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Award for Short Prose (USA). She has participated in residencies including the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada) and the Ventspils International Writers’ Residency (Latvia). Over the past five years, her olfactory research has developed through associations with the Monell Chemical Senses Center (P.A.) and the Institute for Art and Olfaction (L.A.). She has presented and published her research in Canada, the U.S, Italy and the U.A.E. Currently, she is an associate professor within the Sculpture/ Installation department and a member of the graduate studies faculty at OCAD University in Toronto.
MOEZ SURANI’s writing has been published internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Best Canadian Poetry, and the Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported research in India and East Africa, and he has been an artist-in-residence in Finland, Italy, Latvia, Myanmar, Switzerland, Taiwan, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and at the MacDowell Colony in the United States. His visual and performance works have been shown in Toronto at Theatre Passe Muraille, Nuit Blanche, Videofag, Red Head Gallery, and internationally at the Cross Gallery in Taipei, the New Zero Arts Space in Yangon, Palazzolo Acreide’s city hall in Italy and he is a member of the artist-run centre Gallery 44 in Toronto. He is the author of three poetry books: Reticent Bodies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2009), Floating Life (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), and Operations (Book*hug, 2016), which is comprised of the names of military operations, and reveals a globe-spanning inventory of the contemporary rhetoric of violence. A new collection of poetry, Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real (Book*hug, 2019) was published in fall 2019. In an investigation of mediation, image and contemporary politics, he is currently collaborating with Nina Leo on a collection of installation work.
The artists would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for their generous support.