News
Upcoming exhibitions, publications & writing
Mini retrospective at the Lethbridge Independent Film Festival (LIFF) with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG): Saturday, April 12, 2025, 5:30 PM 7:30 PM, GALT MUSEUM AND ARCHIVES with The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995) and Aerial (2019).
An announcement of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery’s exhibition premiere of forest documents (August 9 – October 18, 2025) coming soon.
Preview screenings March 17 for Forest Documents: a reading room immersed in an old growth forest at the Insite2 Sustainability Conference (4th Space Concordia) and April 26, at Wildwood, Ecoforestry Institute Society, that introduce audiences to elements of the Reading Room of forest documents, a 2-channel large format video installation, with technical director Jorge Zavagno.
The installation’s video projections are accompanied by a reading room, in collaboration with artist librarian, John Latour. The reading room provides a number of books, articles, and documents from the Elastic 3D Spaces interdisciplinary research team along with a new publication: a chapbook-memoir by Pacheedaht Elder William Jones, Chronicles of the Forest: From the Walbran to Fairy Creek | What the Forest Needs, Our Heart Needs (2025). Other documents notably that played a role in the work’s development include a 2 volume book on deforestation of the bamboo forests in India, and the resulting desertification, by Sujir’s aunt, Manorama Savur, coming out of her field research in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. Witnessing her aunt’s research influenced Sujir to begin and end The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995), with aerial sequences over a Canadian forest, the narrator, a night cleaner saying, “Sheltered in the space of a Canadian forest are secrets…where the cameras haven’t gone…” The forest documents video installation invites viewers to delve into the research, while they too witness the old-growth forests, within the exhibition spaces created by large format video and spatial audio.
Sujir’s IMAX video experiment, Aerial (2019), part of the Outer Worlds commission with curator Janine Marchessault, will have a Canadian tour, upcoming 2025-2026, with screenings in IMAX theatres in Victoria, BC and Edmonton, Alberta, and in Ottawa, Ontario, in a large screen theatre, with details to follow. Previously, Aerial screened at Queen’s University (March 2024) with a panel following the next day; at the Montreal Science Centre IMAX theatre (October 2023), as part of the Thinking Allowed colloquium with Elastic Spaces at Concordia University. Prior to that, it premiered at the Cinesphere IMAX theatre, in Toronto’s Images festival (April 2019).
Recent exhibitions, publications & writing
Publication of two essays–“The Bloom of Matter, 1979–1981,” a previously unpublished 1986 essay, and “Shaping Matter, 1990–1991”–in the catalogue book for the exhibition, Joyce Wieland: Heart On, with book editors | curators Anne Grace & Georgiana Uhlyarik at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and Art Gallery of Ontario with Goose Lane editions, 2025. Just launched in February, as part of the Wieland exhibition, the previously unpublished essay is from Leila Sujir’s fond at Concordia University’s Records Management and Archive; previous drafts can be found in the Joyce Wieland exhibition files, Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives Special Collections, AGO.
For two weeks in July – August 2023, Sujir and Zavagno participated in a residency at the Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists Studios to test the installation mechanics for its upcoming exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Alberta (2025).
Those That Came Before Us, with Sujir’s video work Peacocks Dream (2018) exhibited at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, June – September 2023, curated by Ana Ferguson.
Chatterjee, Mortimer. Moving Focus, India, New Perspectives on Modern & Contemporary Art. Mumbai, India: The Shoestring Publisher, 2022 [Peacocks Dream].
TechLab: Experiments in media art 1999-2019. Vancouver: Surrey Art Gallery, 2022 [India Heats Beat and Forest Breath].
Sivanesan, Haema. “Unsettling the Picturing of the Canadian Old Growth Forest: Consent, Consultation and (Re)conciliation in Leila Sujir’s Forest!”, Transcultural Studies Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021 [Forest!, Forest Breath and Aerial].
Super Women: Conversations with Real Action Figures with curator Midi Onodera in the CFMDC symposium The Breadth of (2021), screened her video work, The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995).
Tousley, Nancy and Haema Sivanesan, Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980’s. Edmonton, Art Gallery of Alberta, 2020 [India Hearts Beat].
Jesse Cummings, “Outer Worlds,” Canadian Art, May 23rd, 2019 [Aerial].
Tousley, Nancy, “Leila Sujir’s forest of pixels,” Intertwined Histories: Plants in Their Social Contexts (Calgary: University of Calgary Institute for the Humanities, Spring 2019) [Forest! Aerial and Forest Breath].
Suleman, Zool. “Longing and Belonging: 1990’s South Asian Film and Video,” Rungh for Doxa Festival, May 2019 [The Dreams of the Night Cleaners].
The Fotofest Biennial in Houston, Texas, in INDIA – Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art (2018) with curators Sunil Gupta and Steven Evans, exhibited her video installation, Peacocks Dream.
Forest Breath (2018) exhibited in the Supernatural: Art, Technology and the Forest exhibition (2018), with curator Haema Sivanesan at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia and in the exhibition, The Garden in the Machine (2019) with curator Jordan Strom at the Art Gallery of Surrey, British Columbia.
