PANEL

Originally from the French Caribbean (Guadeloupe), Eddy Firmin is an artist-researcher, lecturer, who lives and works in Montreal. He holds a PhD in the study and practice of art from l’Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada) as well as a Masters from the École Supérieure d'Art et Design le Havre-Rouen (France). He is the publication coordinator for the decolonial journal Minorit’Art. His visual work interrogates the transcultural logic of his identity and the power relations at play within it. On a theoretical level, he is working on a “bossal method,” which is aimed at decolonizing the imaginary in art.

Yen-Chao Lin is a Taipei-born Montréal-based multidisciplinary artist. Having grown up in a multifaith family, she is interested in religion, spirituality, divinatory arts, occult sciences, alchemy, and power—everything that can be sensed, but not necessarily seen. Through means of intuitive play, collaboration, scavenging, and collecting, her practice is tactile and often incorporates various craft techniques, such as copper enameling, ceramic, glasswork, and metalsmithing, to create installations, sculptures, and experimental films.

Yen-Chao has been invited to give public presentations at Artexte (Montréal), Centre A (Vancouver), GAX Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art (Montréal), the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, and the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montréal) among others. Her works have been shown at Art Metropole (Toronto), Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong-gah Museum (Taipei), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, OBORO (Montréal), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), and SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Montréal) among others.

Born in Tehran in 1983, Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist active in Montréal since 2018. She earned a BFA in art and graphic design from Soureh University (Tehran), followed by an MFA from Concordia University.

Her work explores notions of displacement, memory, and identity from a psycho-historical perspective. The artist revisits forgotten narratives to show the effect of colonialism on the contemporary world, focusing in particular on the legacy of botany and archaeological exploration. Through a process of reappropriating her history, she parallels the migration of people, plant species, and cultural artifacts, revealing how geopolitical interests transform our perception of reality in different contexts. Interweaving past and present, the “here” and the “elsewhere,” the individual and the collective, her works question the links between culture and politics in the context of globalization.

Her work has been shown extensively in Canada and abroad, notably at the Royal College of Art (London), BIENALSUR, the International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Buenos Aires) and the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto). She was awarded a Grantham Foundation Grant for Art and the Environment in 2021 and the Empreintes residency at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022. She is the grand prizewinner of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award 2023 and the Québec finalist for the prestigious Sobey Arts Award 2023.