Charles Campbell, Black Breath Spectacle, 2022. Photo Dennis Ha. Courtesy of Surrey Art Gallery.

Accompanying Stan Douglas: Allegories of the Present at Griffin Art Projects, ReMIX History is a public program series including film screenings, conversations with curators and panels with artists and musicians.

This virtual panel, hosted by Griffin’s adjunct-curator Dr. Karen Tam, invites four artists to talk about their practices relating to history, storytelling, and archives and explores affinities with Stan Douglas’s work as well as Black diasporic visual production. Michèle Pearson Clarke (Toronto) addresses representation and social engagement through photography, film, video, and installations, and will also share her recent experience as Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019-2022). Charles Campbell (Victoria) explores Black history through his performances and sonic installations, and through his performance character Actor Boy and the Travels in Birdsong and Maroonscape projects. Michaëlle Sergile’s (Montreal) use of weaving and archives in her work questions the official historical narratives of her native Haiti as a way to rewrite histories and reinhabit spaces, while Dawit Petros (Chicago) deals with issues of colonialism, migration, space and architecture in his work, specifically Spazio Disponibile.

Michèle Pearson Clarke is an artist, writer, and educator who works in photography, film, video, and installation. Born in Trinidad and based in Toronto, she has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including in Chicago, Lagos, Los Angeles and Montréal. Most recently, Clarke served as the second Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019-2022), and her work was added to the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Clarke holds an MSW from the University of Toronto, and in 2015 she received her MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University, where she is an Assistant Professor in Photography in the School of Image Arts.

Charles Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator whose practice animates the future imaginaries possible in the wake of slavery and colonization. His artworks, which include sculptures, paintings, sonic installations and performances have been exhibited widely in the Americas and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Vancouver Special, Disorientations and Echo at the Vancouver art Gallery, Fragments of Epic Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Other Side of Now at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Campbell holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith College and a BFA from Concordia University. He currently lives and works on Lekwungen territory, Victoria BC.

Michaëlle Sergile is an independent artist and curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race. In 2022 she exhibited at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, the Musée d'art de Joliette and the Off Biennale of Dakar. She was also nominated for the Sobey National Recognition Award that same year.

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator whose work is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies, drawn from his formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound work according to performative, painterly, or site responsive logics. He completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, an MFA in Visual Art from the

School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, a BFA in Photography from

Concordia University, and a BA in History from the University of Saskatchewan. Petros has exhibited internationally, and his works have been recognized with numerous awards, including Canada Council for the Arts Production Grants, and Artist Residencies at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Petros is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is represented by Tiwani Contemporary in London, UK and Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal, Canada.

Karen Tam is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based artist whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of ‘ethnic’ spaces through installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. She has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the He Xiangning Art Museum. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths (University of London) and a MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau.