Including a panel of professionals, activists and artists, this event will explore the role of individual creatives and organizers in the current political events of the MENA/SWANA region. How can artists help challenge western power structures and representation of the region? How can artists survive and support the community and themselves in an economy that consistently repeals resources and censors us? The Town Hall will include a longer audience participation section to foster access, advice and mobilization.
Hafiz Akinlusi, also known as ANYHOW (he/him), is a cultural producer raised in Lagos, Nigeria whose interest spans visual art, sound, music, film, and system architecture. Grounded in an exploration of Africanness within the diaspora, Hafiz’s practice is driven by an interest in the spaces where ideas, and people converge. His work probes this point of convergence, producing new and counter ways of being as we navigate coexistence in spaces often oppositional to Black life.
Play is crucial to his work—a force that activates both deep collaboration and marginalization. It operates as a site of transformation, inviting flexibility and relationality and pushing us to dismantle norms of what is allowed in favor of what is possible. In doing so, play becomes a tool for stretching meaning, creating space for more accessible, open worlds of contact.
Hafiz Akinlusi is a co-founder of the Black Arts Centre, an artist-run space dedicated to cultivating Black artistic output through multiple mediums. He is also a co-founder of Madebywe, a collaborative space where he and his friends come together to explore identity and existence through creative practice rooted in community, and playful experimentation.
Noor Ghazal is a Lebanese-”Canadian” interdisciplinary artist, cultural curator and community organizer based in the Unceded xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands. Noor’s research and art practice is rooted in Arabfuturism and exploring ways of future building through the retrieving and revival of stories and histories as methods of deciphering and speculating about pasts, presents, and futures. When Noor is not art making, she is organizing and producing a diverse array of events that showcase MENA/SWANA arts and culture. Noor’s work focuses on supporting local artists and bringing MENA/SWANA artists to so-called “Vancouver” from around the globe with the hope of creating more visibility and building community.
Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer whose practice is contextualized by themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and abstraction from one's own sense of self and place.
