On Curation – Mentorship Project

Simon Greifel.

Simon Grefiel

Simon Grefiel (he/him) is an artist whose work engages with ancient and pre-colonial histories and practices from Southeast Asia and around the Pacific. Working with sculpture, found objects, drawings, and plant life, his explorations of language, dreams, spirits, familial stories, and speculative narratives proposes new ways of experiencing the supernatural realm, and the material universe.

Grefiel is currently exploring “Budots,” an electronic music genre and dance style originating from Davao City, Philippines and heavily influence by the indigenous Sama-Bajau. He DJs as a way to explore electronic music in Southeast Asia and the Global South. He is also producing music with collaborator Reylinn McGrath under the moniker “Gulod Tanawin.”

Grefiel was born and raised in Tacloban City, Philippines, and currently lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx ̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His work has been exhibited and screened at Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Gachet, WAAP, and Libby Leshgold Gallery in Vancouver and Gallery TPW in Toronto, ON.

Terri Hron.

Terri Hron

Terri Hron is a musician, a performer and a multimedia artist whose work explores relationships and belonging with places, people and scores. Using historical performance practice, field recording, invented ceramic instruments and videoscores, she often works in close collaboration with others and produces performances, gatherings and events.. From 2017-2024, she was Executive Director of the Canadian New Music Network, where she developed programs focusing on pluralism and sustainability. She is now the editor and general manager of the francophone magazine, Circuit, musiques contemporaines.

https://terrihron.com/

Anju Singh. Photo by Dani Osborne, design by Anju Singh

Anju Singh

Anju Singh is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer and noise/sound artist exposing and interrogating texture through the use of extended/experimental techniques, electronics, musical and non-musical materials, custom-built instruments, and processing. Her works use methods of deconstruction and reanimation to repurpose and contextualize materials in new compositional environments and to bring contrasting themes and dynamics into shared spaces.

Anju has presented and performed work across Canada, in Europe, Brazil, Mexico, Japan and the United States. She also works as a producer, arts programmer, and curator working on the Vancouver Noise Festival for 9 years, participating in a co-curating committee for the MAC (Media Arts Committee) Sound Art program since 2011, and curating and organizing Fake Jazz Wednesdays for a few years in its early inception period.

https://www.anjusingh.com/

Freya Zinovieff.

Freya Zinovieff

Freya Zinovieff is an interdisciplinary scholar, sound artist and curator of British and Russian descent, currently completing her PhD at The School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. Her thesis, Situated Praxis: Activist Listening in Violent Times, examines the political potential of sound, alongside decolonial and ethical listening as critique to hegemonic systems of power. Freya’s MFA, awarded by The University of New South Wales, questioned different conceptions of infinity through the medium of graphic notation, and she holds a First-Class Honours degree from Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University.

Freya’s curatorial practice seeks to challenge both colonial hierarchies and aesthetic sensibilities, and foregrounds collaboration as an act of resistance. She is interested in work that that engages decolonial and anti-imperial thinking in radical ways, and especially through the amplification of voices that seek disruption for the purposes of justice and community building. Freya’s curatorial projects range from conceptual art trails in Cambridge (UK) that utilize non-gallery spaces, challenging colonial value judgements around what is considered art, or beautiful, and where ‘beautiful art’ should be shown; to an online sound art gallery that commissioned new works from five BC-based sound artists of marginalized gender, to explore the potential of accessible sound art.

More information on these projects and Freya’s work in general can be found in the links below:

https://www.freyazinovieff.com

http://criticalmediartstudio.com/

https://chaotic-rhythms.ca/

https://radicalpraxislab.com

Raven Chacon. Photo by Neal Santos.

Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022).

His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
http://spiderwebsinthesky.com/portfolio/

Peter Hatch.

Peter Hatch

Composer and music curator Peter Hatch has composed works in a large number of genres, from orchestral and chamber music to instrumental theatre, electroacoustics and installations. Known for his interest in revitalizing the listening experience, Hatch’s compositions are both heady and playful, profound and humorous. His works are performed and broadcast internationally and has been featured at festivals such as the ISCM World Music Days, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik, Montreal’s Espaces Improbable, the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Vancouver Early Music Festival, and by organizations such as Aventa, Soundstreams, Arraymusic, the Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton, Windsor, Victoria and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphonies and by members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Hatch’s music been recorded on numerous compact discs under the CBC Musica Viva, CMC Centrediscs, Conaccord, CBC and Artifact labels.

​Theatrical and multi-media elements have been incorporated into many of his works, an interest that has grown from extending traditional concert music performance practices and from collaborations with director David McMurray Smith, architect Dereck Revington, choreographers David Earle and Bill James and writers John Sobol and Adam Cowart. The writings of Gertrude Stein have played an important role in his compositions and this influence has resulted in compositions ranging from the full evening instrumental theatre piece ‘Mounting Picasso’ to his very short opera ‘Asks Alice’.

As well as his compositional work, Peter has been very active as the artistic director of new music ensembles and festivals. He founded NUMUS Concerts in 1985, and the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound in 1998, two organizations that have continued to thrive years after their beginnings. Peter was Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony from 1999-2003 and Arts and Culture Consultant with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from 2011 to 2013. From 1985 to 2017 Peter was a Professor at the Faculty of Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, where he was University Research Professor for the 2006-07 academic year and is now Professor Emeritus. Peter now makes his home in the Gulf Islands on the west coast of Canada.

https://www.peterhatch.ca/

Laura Netz.

Laura Netz

Laura Netz is a curator, artist, and researcher. Currently, she is an MPhil student at CRiSAP – UAL, where studies the new tendencies in curatorial practices in sonic arts.

In 2006, she graduated in Art History (University of Barcelona) and continued studies receiving a Master in Cultural Practices and New Media Art (University Ramon Llull). In 2009, she established herself in London where attended the Curating course (Central Saint Martins, UAL). One year after, she was granted to study at MAH Media Art Histories (Donau University, Krems, Austria). In 2011 she attended the professional course about New Media Curating, led by Beryl Graham (University of Sunderland).

Interested in sound art, science, technology and digital media, she is an active participant in hacking culture.

Over these years, as a curator, she has taken part in many international events such as exhibitions, workshops, conferences, publications, and concerts in Spain, Portugal, UK, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Serbia, Russia, Hong Kong, the U.S., and Brasil.

Among the collaborations, she developed projects with various institutions such as Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico, MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, CCCB Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, MOTA Museum of Transitory Art, ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Arts. She has worked with the following new media festivals, ArtFutura, MUTEK, Alpha-ville. She collaborates with artists such as Locus Sonus, Scanner, Roy Ascott, Konrad Becker, Fran Illich, Milo Taylor, and Arcangelo Constantini, among much more.

http://netzzz.net/

Aki Onda. Photo by Enrique Macías Martínez.

Aki Onda

Aki Onda is an artist, composer, performer, and curator. Onda’s works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as their widely-known project, Cassette Memories (2004–ongoing), drawn from three decades of field recordings.

Crossing genres, Onda has been active internationally in art, film, music and performance. Their artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Raha Raissnia, Ho Tzu Nyen, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, Annea Lockwood, David Toop and Akio Suzuki. 

Onda has presented their work at The Kitchen, MoMA, MoMA P.S.1, New Museum, Blank Forms, ICA Philadelphia, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, Walker Art Center, documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Argos, Bozar, ICA London, La Casa Encendida, Caixa Forum, Serralves Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nam June Paik Art Center and many others. 

Onda has been active as a curator and organized major performances and exhibitions throughout Asia and North America. They were Guest Director of TPAM-Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (current YPAM), Japan from 2016-19 and currently work as Curator-at-Large for Western Front, Vancouver.
https://akionda.net/