EXECUTIVE director/curator for the Art and Media Lab, Isabel Bader Centre for Preforming Arts 24-25

The Art + Media Lab, situated at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, is a space for artistic innovation, community engagement, and other forms of creative practice. It is a space for experimentation, creation, process and exploration.The Art & Media Lab can take on many programmatic formats. Artistically and curatorially, it can follow the conventions of a gallery or performance space, used to host exhibitions and events. Experimentally, it can become a workshop for producers and learners who are needing space to chart trajectories for where their work may lead. At the Art + Media Lab, our mandate is to facilitate a unique space at Queen’s University where students, faculty and the public can meet to engage directly with artistic practice and new forms of academic research.

Open Monday – Friday, 10 am – 4 pm
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
390 King Street West, Kingston, ON , Canada

2025

Weaving Encounters, Jung-Ah Kim, January 8 - 17, 2025

What began as a seasonal contract with the Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners turned into a magic carpet ride of discovery – finding a mysterious traditional “Korean” carpet at the Canadian Museum and reconstructing a warp-weighted loom, an ancient weaving technology believed to produce such textiles. Guided by evolving interests and experiences, this project is a curatorial exploration of weaving as a medium for technological inquiry, material studies, and knowledge production through the act of creation.

The exhibition features video installations, a recreation of the warp-weighted loom built from raw materials (co-created with Brandon Elderhorst), and daily weaving demonstrations on the loom from 2 PM to 4 PM. On Thursday, January 16, if we’re lucky and the woven fabric progresses enough, you’ll see a bird from the Korean carpet come to life as an animation on the loom between 2 PM and 4 PM.

Black Futures Interrelations of Race, Technology and Art, Film 477 - Black Aesthetics and Politics in Media Studies in Race Culture and Art & Map 300 Media Performance Production II, Under the guidance of Ali Na, February 7 - 14, 2025

Black Futures engaged with artists creating concepts about and related to Black futures. We are showcasing work being done by Qanita villa, Associate Curator Arts of Africa at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, installed at Museum London “Ukutula Our Timeless Journey, which reflects on diasporic roots inviting museum goers to explore questions of time, place and belonging. This exhibition features a video walk through projected on the back wall of the AML additionally we have curated portions of Lilla’s podcasts with the artists.

In this exhibition, students have also worked to reflect on important artistic contributions to Black futurity. For example, using varied techniques students animated Sun Ra album covers to visual historical elements of Afrofuturist aethetics. Our installation is influenced by the ideas explored in Bell Hook’s writing on Carrie Mae Weems that underscores the importance of non-singular diverse representations of blackness.

Corrugation Pixelation, Andrea Malus, February 18–20, 2025

At the intersection of puppetry, mask performance, and stop-motion animation, I focus on the building process of performing objects and their activation through pixelation.
During the exhibition participants are invited to engage directly in the animation process, either by performing behind a mask or in costume, or by observing how movement, performance, and stop-motion converge to create a time-based medium.

This event offers a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between embodied performance and animated form in an evolving creative space by transforming the gallery into a collaborative site of creation and embodied storytelling, rather than a passive display space. The installation includes the themes of ephemerality, co-creation, and embodied storytelling, making the artistic process itself as significant as the final film or animation.

Unfolding Identity in Affective Spaces, Professional Development in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Students: Sana Kazemirashid, Andrea Malus. and Anran Zheng February 27-March 8, 2:30PM - 5:30PM

This exhibition is a class project for SCCS 810 Professional Development in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies under the guidance of Professor Gabriel Menotti, featuring Andrea Malus’s pixelation piece, Corrugation Pixelation Compilation, Sana Kazemirashid’s animation, Growing Up, and Anran Zheng’s mini-documentary, Detong, all screening on a continuous loop. Curated by Anran Zheng and Sana Kazemirashid with the invaluable support of our amazing technician, Cam Miller.

From a misrecognized self, alienated by the Other and deprived of subjectivity, to a more process-materialist perspective that embraces becoming, multiplicity, and fluidity in personal growth, these three video works look into the changing bodily capacities in the formation of identity. Through animation, pixelation, and non-fiction documentary, the video show Unfolding Identity in Affective Spaces raises the following questions: How do bodily capacities transform within affective spaces? What becomes visible when the "body" is entangled with other molecular entities in the world? How is identity constructed through the flux of affect--both within the character and in their dynamic interactions with the surrounding environment?