Leila Sujir

NEWS

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, upcoming April 11-13, 2025, with The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995) and Aerial (2019). 

Previews March 17 for forest documents: a reading room immersed in an old growth forest at the Insite2 Sustainability Conference (4th Space Concordia) and upcoming 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 Elastic Spaces Press new chapbook, Chronicles of the Forest.

An announcement coming soon, about the Southern Alberta Art Gallery's upcoming premiere of forest documents (August 9 -October 18, 2025). 

Upcoming Canadian screenings of Aerial (2019) in Outer Worlds, 2025-2026, with curator Janine Marchessault at IMAX theatres in Victoria, BC (October 12); Edmonton, Alberta; and in Ottawa, Ontario at a large screen cinema (details to be announced).  

Publication of "The Bloom of Matter, 1979–1981" from a previously unpublished 1986 essay, and "Shaping Matter, 1990–1991" in the catalogue book for the exhibition, Joyce Wieland: Heart On, with book editors|curators Anne Grace &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, February 2025.

Leila Sujir is an artist and professor emeritus at Concordia University in the Intermedia (Video, Performance, Electronic Arts) area of the Studio Arts department in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She has recently completed a new body of work, with video projections: one on the forests near Port Renfrew on the west coast of Canada that she has received a Canada Council for the Arts Concept to Realization grant (2022), for forest documents. She is also continuing her focus on migration.

forest documents, a stereoscopic 3D video sculptural video installation in-progress with a 60 minute cycle, places the viewer in a forest of pixels with a reading room; it is in preview now, towards an upcoming exhibition in 2025, with  a recent publication on this body of work in Journal of Transcultural Studies, March 2021.

Aerial, a large format video art commission by curator Janine Marchessault for Outer Worlds, an artistic experiment with IMAX technologies, will tour across Canada in 2025-2026 with the work of four other artists (Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, and Michael Snow) supported by a Canada Council Touring grant.  The project launched in Toronto April 18, 2019 at the Cinesphere IMAX at the closing night of the Images festival, was exhibited in Montreal October 19, 2023, as part of the Thinking Allowed project at the Montreal Science Centre IMAX theatre, and screened at Queen's University in Kingston, March 7, 2024, and screened at the Westben music festival, in Northumberland, Ontario, July 17, 2024.

Leila Sujir is the principal investigator of a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, Elastic Forest Spaces (2024), and a SSHRC Connection grant, Thinking Allowed (2022).  The Thinking Allowed project launched March 13, 2023 within the Concordia University Sustainability Conference, continued June 12-16 at 4th Space Concordia and October 19-21, with 4th Space Concordia, the Montreal Botanical Garden, and the Montreal Science Centre. Previous SSHRC grants include a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Elastic 3D Spaces: Bodies and Belonging (2016-2019).

From 2017 to 2022, she was chair of the Studio Arts Department, in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

In 2005-2006, Sujir was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Calgary, a one year research position as an artist in the Interactions Lab in the Department of Computer Science. Starting in 2011, she began working with Montreal-based Janro's Sandde 3D drawing tool, as the lead researcher on two grants investigating its potential as a performance, drawing, and sculptural tool (CINQ/Mitacs). She has been an artist in residence at the Bath School of Art, at Bath Spa University in the UK (2014-2015) where she developed a stereoscopic video projection for a building facade, Elastic City Spacey (January 2015). She was also an artist in residence at the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia (June 2013) where she presented at the International Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA), and was an artist in residence at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia (July 2012), as well as being an artist in residence at the Banff Centre (Fall 2013|Winter 2014, and  most recently, at the Leighton Studios in Summer 2023).

Sujir’s video works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, U.K. as well as galleries and festivals all over the world. New Republics, a group exhibition out of the U.K. toured Canada and Australia 1999-2000 (in Australia to Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts; University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide; Canberra School of Art; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; in Canada to Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; and beginning in the U.K. at Canada House, London). A solo exhibition that has toured galleries in Canada, Luminous Stories, initiated by the Art Gallery of Peterborough, covering ten years of her video art production, toured to A Space, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Southern Art Gallery and University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.

Select publications on Sujir's art work include the following:

-India Hearts Beat and Forest Breath from the Surrey Art Gallery, TechLab: Experiments in Media Art 1999-2019 (2022).

-an essay by curator Haema Sivanesan in Journal of Transcultural Studies, “Unsettling the Picturing of the Canadian Old Growth Forest: Consent, Consultation and (Re)conciliation in Leila Sujir's Forest!" (2021):

https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/24248/17987

 -essays by curators Nancy Tousley and Haema Sivanesan in Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980’s, a book from the Art Gallery of Alberta, edited by Lindsey Sharman (2020).
-a chapter of a book by curator Nancy Tousley, "Leila Sujir’s forest of pixels,”  in  Intertwined Histories: Plants in Their Social Contexts from the University of Calgary Institute for the Humanities (2019).

 -curators Sunil Gupta and Steve Evans' book from the Houston, Texas Fotofest Biennial: India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art  (2018). 
-curator and editor Srimoyee Mitra’s book, Border Cultures (2016).  
-curators Katherine Ylitalo and Nancy Tousley, with editor Melanie Kjorlien’s book, Made in Calgary: An Exploration of Art from 1960 to the 2000’s (2016).