EXECUTIVE director/curator for the Art and Media Lab, Isabel Bader Centre for Preforming Arts 24-25

The Art + Media Lab, situated at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, is a space for artistic innovation, community engagement, and other forms of creative practice. It is a space for experimentation, creation, process and exploration.The Art & Media Lab can take on many programmatic formats. Artistically and curatorially, it can follow the conventions of a gallery or performance space, used to host exhibitions and events. Experimentally, it can become a workshop for producers and learners who are needing space to chart trajectories for where their work may lead. At the Art + Media Lab, our mandate is to facilitate a unique space at Queen’s University where students, faculty and the public can meet to engage directly with artistic practice and new forms of academic research.

Open Monday – Friday, 10 am – 4 pm
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
390 King Street West, Kingston, ON , Canada

2025

Weaving Encounters, Jung-Ah Kim, January 8 - 17, 2025

What began as a seasonal contract with the Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners turned into a magic carpet ride of discovery – finding a mysterious traditional “Korean” carpet at the Canadian Museum and reconstructing a warp-weighted loom, an ancient weaving technology believed to produce such textiles. Guided by evolving interests and experiences, this project is a curatorial exploration of weaving as a medium for technological inquiry, material studies, and knowledge production through the act of creation.

The exhibition features video installations, a recreation of the warp-weighted loom built from raw materials (co-created with Brandon Elderhorst), and daily weaving demonstrations on the loom from 2 PM to 4 PM. On Thursday, January 16, if we’re lucky and the woven fabric progresses enough, you’ll see a bird from the Korean carpet come to life as an animation on the loom between 2 PM and 4 PM.

Black Futures Interrelations of Race, Technology and Art, Film 477 - Black Aesthetics and Politics in Media Studies in Race Culture and Art & Map 300 Media Performance Production II, Under the guidance of Ali Na, February 7 - 14, 2025

Black Futures engaged with artists creating concepts about and related to Black futures. We are showcasing work being done by Qanita villa, Associate Curator Arts of Africa at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, installed at Museum London “Ukutula Our Timeless Journey, which reflects on diasporic roots inviting museum goers to explore questions of time, place and belonging. This exhibition features a video walk through projected on the back wall of the AML additionally we have curated portions of Lilla’s podcasts with the artists.

In this exhibition, students have also worked to reflect on important artistic contributions to Black futurity. For example, using varied techniques students animated Sun Ra album covers to visual historical elements of Afrofuturist aethetics. Our installation is influenced by the ideas explored in Bell Hook’s writing on Carrie Mae Weems that underscores the importance of non-singular diverse representations of blackness.

Corrugation Pixelation, Andrea Malus, February 18–20, 2025

At the intersection of puppetry, mask performance, and stop-motion animation, I focus on the building process of performing objects and their activation through pixelation.
During the exhibition participants are invited to engage directly in the animation process, either by performing behind a mask or in costume, or by observing how movement, performance, and stop-motion converge to create a time-based medium.

This event offers a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between embodied performance and animated form in an evolving creative space by transforming the gallery into a collaborative site of creation and embodied storytelling, rather than a passive display space. The installation includes the themes of ephemerality, co-creation, and embodied storytelling, making the artistic process itself as significant as the final film or animation.

Unfolding Identity in Affective Spaces, Professional Development in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Students: Sana Kazemirashid, Andrea Malus. and Anran Zheng February 27-March 8, 2:30PM - 5:30PM

This exhibition is a class project for SCCS 810 Professional Development in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies under the guidance of Professor Gabriel Menotti, featuring Andrea Malus’s pixelation piece, Corrugation Pixelation Compilation, Sana Kazemirashid’s animation, Growing Up, and Anran Zheng’s mini-documentary, Detong, all screening on a continuous loop. Curated by Anran Zheng and Sana Kazemirashid with the invaluable support of our amazing technician, Cam Miller.

From a misrecognized self, alienated by the Other and deprived of subjectivity, to a more process-materialist perspective that embraces becoming, multiplicity, and fluidity in personal growth, these three video works look into the changing bodily capacities in the formation of identity. Through animation, pixelation, and non-fiction documentary, the video show Unfolding Identity in Affective Spaces raises the following questions: How do bodily capacities transform within affective spaces? What becomes visible when the "body" is entangled with other molecular entities in the world? How is identity constructed through the flux of affect--both within the character and in their dynamic interactions with the surrounding environment?

FMSAC, May 27-29.
The Film and Media Studies Association of Canada (FMSAC) is a non-profit scholarly organization, founded in 1977, which seeks to foster and advance the study of film and media in Canada and abroad from both a historical and aesthetic perspective. Our members are made up of professors, students, professionals, and non-specialists. Members receive a subscription to the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and are eligible to attend our annual conference.

Tuesday, May 27
10:00 am - 12:00 pm Fabulating Worlds & Miiwaajimo (Tells a Good Story) Mary Bunch and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm Performative Archival Imaginings in the Jamaican Diaspora in Ontario, Debbie Ebanks Schlums and Sonya Mwambu
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Miryam Charles is the Sylvia D. Hamilton Dialogues guest artist for FMSAC 2025, 4 Selected Films

Wednesday, May 28
9:30 am - 11:00 am Miryam Charles is the Sylvia D. Hamilton Dialogues guest artist for FMSAC 2025, 4 Selected Films
11:30 am - 1:00 pm Reflections from Palestine: A Place of Waiting, Faten Nastas Mitwasi
1:30 pm - 4:00 pm Miryam Charles is the Sylvia D. Hamilton Dialogues guest artist for FMSAC 2025, 4 Selected Films

Thursday, May 29
9:30 am -11:00 am Miryam Charles is the Sylvia D. Hamilton Dialogues guest artist for FMSAC 2025, 4 Selected Films
11:30 am - 1:00 pm Micro-budgets, A Filmmaker’s Imagination, and the Audience’s Expectation: A Treatise on the Aesthetics Against Interpassivity Zachary Goldkind
1:30 pm - 4:00 pm: SCCS Graduate Student Films, A Selection. Sleepwalking Kingston, Ahmed Ismaiel, Story of Modam, Jung-Ah Kim, The Dance of Malleability & Corrugation Pixelation Compilation Andrea Malus, Detong, Anran Zheng

Apparent Texture, curated by Peggy Fussell, July 2, 1–4pm and July 3 & 4, 10am–4pm
This exhibition features four fibre artists exploring how analog craft translates into digital media.
• Jung Ah Kim’s Pixel Burst is a stop-motion animation that plays with the tension between woven imagery and digital images.
• Cat Feraday Miller’s VR game Birbs , features her quirky felted birds.
• Tiina Kukkonen created dreamy felted landscapes.
• Peggy Fussell’s Pest House is an assemblage of embroidered paper puppets and digitally composited animations

Ancestral Connections: Sam Sunwoo and Seymour Irons, July 21 – 27, 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Digital Roots Afro - Futures
A 2D & VR Quest Inspired by Traditional Afro-Spiritual Practices

Soul Food: VR Reinterpretation of Korea’s Traditional Ritual Ceremony ‘Jesa’
Live Demonstrations daily 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Koreans’ profound love for food extends far beyond nourishment—food becomes memory, identity, and emotion.

This immersive art project reimagines Jesa, the traditional Korean ancestral rite of offering food to ancestors, through personal memory, embodied perspective, and digital storytelling. Drawing from the intimate rituals of my own family, the work invites participants to enter the ceremony as an ancestral spirit themselves.

Within this sacred virtual space, food becomes a vessel of remembrance. Participants float across a Jesa table rendered in vivid sensory detail—each dish embedded with recorded wishes, sounds, and textures that evoke family, longing, and spiritual presence. In this liminal realm, the boundary between past and present dissolves, inviting reflection on identity, memory, and what it means to be both remembered and remembering.

In this exhibition, participants will experience the process of preparing and serving food to the ancestor and discover its cultural and emotional significance.
Sam Sunwoo is a producer and artist with over eight years of experience in the Korean and Canadian media industries. She has produced internationally acclaimed, award-winning animated series and videos, earning recognition for her creative direction and production expertise. Her current practice explores the immersive media, with a focus on interactive and emotionally resonant storytelling. Through virtual reality and hybrid formats, she examines memory, identity, and cultural rituals, inviting audiences into reflective and participatory experiences.