Western Front’s artists-in-residence program was initiated in 1977 by artist and Western Front co-founder Kate Craig. It remains the heart of our programming today.

This curated program provides invited Canadian and international artists to pursue new developments in their practices and to produce new work. It focuses on artists working across music, media, time-based visual art, performance, and literature. While in residence, artists are supported with a fee, production budget, and curatorial and technical expertise, and are hosted on-site at Western Front or off-site on location, as required. The number of residencies and their structure and duration are tailored to each individual artist and project.

Many projects produced through our artists-in-residence program are done so in collaboration with partner institutions in Canada and internationally. We also offer audiences opportunities to engage with residents and their work at various stages of a project’s development and presentation.

A portrait of Siku Allooloo looking directly at the camera with her hands in the pocket of her jacket. She is standing outside and a lake, snow capped mountains, and a mauve sunset can be seen in the background.

While in residence, Siku Allooloo will work on the development of a feature-length documentary in honour of her mother, historic Indigenous women’s activism, and Taíno resurgence.

Siku Allooloo is an Inuk/Haitian/Taíno filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, poet, and community builder. She comes from Denendeh, Northwest Territories, by way of Haïti through her mother and Mittimatalik, Nunavut, through her father. Allooloo often reimagines conventional forms as imbued by her cultural traditions, oral history, and land-based practice. She resides in the unceded homeland of K’ómoks First Nation.

Nina Davies stands in theatrical space. She looks directly at the camera with her hair down and hands placed behind her back. She wears black tracksuit pants and a bright lime coloured sports top.

While in residence, Nina Davies will create her first digital novel. Taking the debate over whether “Death by GPS” should be recognized as an official cause of death as its starting point, the project imagines a world where navigation and location are generated. In this world, human agents use their bodies to blur the boundaries between real and fictional environments. Conceived as a digital novel, the work will also extend into a moving image work and installation.

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment by observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Working primarily with video, performance, writing, and installation, her work considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which it emerges. This includes research into the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms, and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices.

A portrait of Bruno Zhu wraps behind a metal door on a yellow brick storefront. Mimicking a spread in a fashion magazine, he appears against a purple background with white serif text, the most legible line reading Loneliness is a Poison. His skin looks airbrushed or as if run through a beauty filter.

While in residence, Bruno Zhu of A Maior will lead a series of workshops with local writers towards the development of the sequel novella to Retail Vérité (2023). The series navigates thoughts on commerce, fashion, and popular culture to draw a portrait of contemporary retail phenomena.

Bruno Zhu works and lives between Portugal and the Netherlands. His practice employs methods that cut, stitch, and write against normative alignments of knowledge production and social reproduction. Mechanisms of desire, identity, and ideology inform Zhu’s work, in which he paraphrases agency, authorship, consumption, and power. His object-driven installations turn the audience into cultural actors who can produce their own meanings. Zhu is a member of A Maior, a curatorial program set in a home furnishings and clothing store in Viseu, Portugal.

Presented with the support of the Audain Foundtion.