Panel discussion
In this live conversation, Cheryl Sim, managing director and curator at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, and artists from the exhibition Emergence & Convergence will discuss their work, which meets at the intersection of the self, digital technology, the built environment and the natural world.
Video
Project Credits / Acknowledgements
Artists: Katherine Melançon, George Fok and Moritz Wehrmann
Moderator: Cheryl Sim, Managing Director and Curator, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
Biographies
Cheryl Sim
Cheryl Sim is Managing Director and Curator at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. Recent exhibitions include RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting, Phil Collins and GROWING FREEDOM by Yoko Ono. Sim is also a media artist whose practice incorporates her background in media studies and research on post-colonial strategies in contemporary art practice. Her video and installation work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals in North America and Europe. In 2015 she completed a PhD in the études et pratiques des arts program at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). Her book “Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a Chinese Diaspora” launched in September of 2019 on Bloomsbury Academic.
Katherine Melançon
A graduate of Central Saint-Martins College of Arts & Design in London, Katherine Melançon has exhibited in Europe, the United States and Canada. Working in Montreal, she is interested in non-traditional processes, tools, and materials, as well as the use of camera-less photography to reveal aspects of the natural. In her latest works, nature controls what is created by humans. Katherine lives and works in Montreal.
George Fok
George Fok is a Hongkongese and Canadian video artist living in Montreal. Creative director at the PHI Centre, his work at the intersection of new media art, installation and filmmaking has been presented in cultural institutions around the world, such as the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, the GL Strand and Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, and New York’s Jewish Museum. His rejection of disciplinary boundaries allows him to look more closely at the plastic nature of images and to create new opportunities for representation.
Moritz Wehrmann
Born in 1980, Moritz Wehrmann lives and works in Berlin. Since 2016, he has been a researcher at the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, in addition to collaborating since 2010 with Professor Alain Berthoz at the Laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action (LPPA) at the Collège de France in Paris. His works, addressing themes of self-perception and the cognitive processes involved in the processing of visual information, have become a tool for science, inspiring research in the field of psychology.