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 local and international artists with the opportunity 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.

While our new digital archive is being prepared, you can search past residents at Western Front’s legacy website here.

Samita Sinha sings into a microphone. She is wearing a black singlet and tights, and ropes of small bells around her neck and hips.

While in residence at Western Front, artist and composer Samita Sinha will develop a new work to be premiered in 2023. In response to the mounting crises of our time, and working in collaboration with architect Sunil Bald and composer Ash Fure, Sinha will compose a vibrational, ventricular space from the raw material of micro sounds decomposed from Indian classical music.

Samita Sinha is an artist and composer who creates multidisciplinary performance works that investigate origins of voice. She synthesizes Indian vocal traditions and embodied practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha’s works have been commissioned and presented by Asia Society, Performance Space 122, Danspace Project, Rubin Museum of Art, Queens Museum, and Gibney Dance, among others. Sinha also teaches voice.

Presented with the support of the Government of Canada and SOCAN Foundation.

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.

Shen Xin turns sideways to look directly at the camera. They are lit theatrically by a red light.

While in residence, Shen Xin will work on the development of Solar Wheels of the Steppes (working title), a film that presents a science fiction narrative of wild horses in North America/Turtle Island and Xinjiang, China. The horses’ relationships with technologies, ecosystems, humans, and land reveal sustainable interrelationships between culture and ecology across geography.

Shen Xin practices empowering alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states. Their interests lie in understanding culture on its own terms. Seeing it as an active commitment to the learning, teaching, and relating to places as land, their practice opens up to inhabiting multitudes of selves through the lens of time. Engaged with moving image, video installation, public event and collective process, Shen Xin imagines and creates affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities. Shen Xin practices on Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the land of the Dakhóta Oyáte, as well as on Lënapehòkink (New York City), the land of the Lenape peoples.

Supported by the Jerome Foundation.

Sol Hashemi kneels in a small closet space with walls covered in silver-coloured reflective insulation. He wears a light blue shirt with dark blue jeans and a white glove on his hand.

While in residence at Western Front, artist Sol Hashemi will take up occupancy in front and back of house spaces—such as the garden, kitchen, woodshop, and basement—to develop new works in progress.

Sol Hashemi (b. 1987) is an artist from Vancouver, USA, based in Vancouver, Canada. He views his artworks as mushrooms popping up occasionally from a vast mycorrhizal web. His practice spans many niches, including foraging, woodworking, experimental product photography, stoneworking, cooking, organizing, conceptual floral design, writing, conversation, curating, brewing, and the internet. He was a co-founder of Veronica, Seattle, and is a recipient of the Kayla Skinner Award from the Seattle Art Museum.