News
Exhibitions, screenings, publications & podcasts
North of Superior podcast. Listen to Christian Zyp interview Janine Marchessault (curator), Leila Sujir (artist/filmmaker) and Catherine Mondragon about a FREE screening presented by the Public Access Collective. OUTER WORLDS was at the Telus World of Science IMAX Theatre in Edmonton Thursday, October 9. This cross Canada program features five experimental IMAX films by leading Canadian artists: Michael Snow, Lisa Jackson, Oliver Husain, Kelly Richardson, and Leila Sujir. The program is curated by York University professor Janine Marchessault.
Southern Alberta Art Gallery’s exhibition of forest documents August 9 – through to October 18, 2025 with a Zoom presentation for the University of Lethbridge’s Art Now series, with Leila Sujir and Technical Director Jorge Zavagno October 3, 2025.
A new publication produced by the Elastic 3D Spaces interdisciplinary research team! 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).
Sujir’s IMAX video experiment, Aerial (2019), part of the Outer Worlds commission of five artist works, with curator Janine Marchessault, is having its Canadian tour, with the support of a Canada Council Touring grant. Upcoming 2026: a screening in IMAX theatres in Victoria, BC April 19 and in Sudbury, Ontario May 7. The Edmonton, Alberta screening October 9, 2025, was well attended with a lively Q & A with curator Janine Marchessault, technical director Jorge Zavagno, artist director Leila Sujir, and head of Edmonton Screen moderating, Luke Azevedo.
Previously, Aerial, with the Outer Worlds program, screened at Queen’s University (March 2024) with a panel following the next day; the five artist program screened 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, the Outer Worlds program premiered at the Cinesphere IMAX theatre, in Toronto’s Images festival (April 2019).
Recent exhibitions, publications & writing
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, activities that introduce audiences to elements of the Reading Room of forest
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.
Mini retrospective at the Lethbridge Independent Film Festival (LIFF) with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG): Saturday, April 12, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM, GALT MUSEUM AND ARCHIVES. [The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995) and Aerial (2019)]
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.
