Biography

Over the last forty years, Leila Sujir has been building a body of video art works using a mix of fiction, fantasy and documentary with visual and audio collage techniques. Her video art works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery  (Liverpool), as well as galleries all over the world. Her work is in collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Glenbow Museum.

Recent exhibitions include The Dreams of the Night Cleaners, with curator Midi Onodera, in Super Women: Conversations with Real Action Figures in the CFMDC symposium The Breadth of (2021); Aerial with Outer Worlds curator Janine Marchessault, launched in Toronto April 19, 2019 at the Cinesphere IMAX theatre;  Peacocks Dream, with curators Sunil Gupta and Steven Evans at the Fotofest Biennial in Houston, Texas, in INDIA – Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art (2018); Forest Breath with curator Haema Sivanesan at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia in  Supernatural: Art, Technology and the Forest (2018) and curator Jordan Strom at the Art Gallery of Surrey in The Garden in the Machine (2019).

Leila Sujir, an associate professor in the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University, works within Intermedia (video, performance, electronic arts) and within an art research studio-lab based at Concordia University, Elastic 3D Spaces, that most recently received a SSHRC grant, Thinking Allowed (2022), a Canada Council production grant (2022), and prior to that Elastic 3D Spaces: the old growth forest as ‘home’ space with an emphasis on land, healing, home, communities (2019). In a recent publication from Oxford University Press, Practices of Projection (2020),  she co-wrote a chapter with Anthony Head, “Researching virtual, augmented and mixed realities, or how the Elastic 3D Spaces project emerged from an outdoor projection event.”

Select publications on her work include: Peacocks Dream in Moving Focus, India (2022);India Hearts Beat and Forest Breath in a book project from the Surrey Art Gallery, TechLab: Experiments in Media Art 1999-2019 (2022); an essay by Haema Sivanesan in the Journal of Transcultural Studies, “Unsettling the Picturing of the Canadian Old Growth Forest: Consent, Consultation and (Re)conciliation in Leila Sujir’s Forest!” (2021)a chapter by Nancy Tousley,”Leila Sujir’s forest of pixels,” in the book Intertwined Histories: Plants in Their Social Contexts from the University of Calgary Institute for the Humanities (2019); Sunil Gupta and Steve Evans’ book from the Houston, Texas Fotofest Biennial:  India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art by (2018);  Srimoyee Mitra’s book Border Cultures (2016); Katherine Ylitalo and Nancy Tousley, with Melanie Kjorlien’s book Made in Calgary: An Exploration of Art from 1960 to the 2000’s (2016).