Charles Campbell is a Jamaican born interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based on lək̓ʷəŋən territory, Victoria BC. Using sculpture, sound, installation and performance, his work pulls at the threads of time. Finding channels into the past and future Campbell reconstructs broken somatic, communal and spiritual connections, creating spaces of solace and meaning for all of us living in the wake of slavery and colonization. His most recent work recreates the submerged terrain where African and North American tectonic plates converge, bringing us in proximity to the realm of spirits lost in hundreds of years of forced Atlantic crossings.

Campbell’s artworks have been exhibited widely in the Caribbean, Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include The Other Side of Now (Perez Art Museum Miami), How Not to Be Seen (Remai Modern), Vancouver Special, Fragments of Epic Memory (Art Gallery of Ontario) and How many colours has the sea (The Power Plant Gallery). Campbell is the recipient of numerous awards and holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and a BFA from Concordia University.

Photo by Lia Crowe

Iman Raad (b. 1979, Mashhad, Iran) is a New York-based visual artist, graphic designer, and educator. He holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, and teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art.

Raad works across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, embroidery, graphic work and performance lectures.  His work has been featured in several books including The Phaidon archive of 500 designs that matter and his art practice acknowledged in a variety of media including The New York Times, Artspace and art21. Recent exhibitions include the 58th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh,  the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at QAGOMA in Brisbane, group shows at  the British Museum in London, the Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He has exhibited with Dastan Gallery in Tehran, Josh Lilley in London, and Sargent’s Daughters in New York.

Photo by Kaveh Kowsari

Mohsen Khalili (b. 1966, Tehran) is an Iranian Canadian multidisciplinary conceptual artist based on the unceded territories of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɬ Nations (Vancouver, BC). In a career spanning over three decades, Khalili’s works have been exhibited across Canada and internationally, including in the US, Iran, Japan, Taiwan, and Kuwait.

Khalili’s work is largely informed by his experiences of displacement, physical disability, and isolation. His paintings and sculptures often deal with disparate visual elements struggling to belong, function, or communicate within a larger structure. While his practice is positioned in dialogue with multiple artistic traditions and techniques, Khalili’s creative process involves an instinctive and organic negotiation with the material. He draws inspiration from diverse artistic disciplines to constructing an inclusive visual language that underscores the universality of the experiences and anxieties that he depicts, offering a space for collective catharsis and shared understanding.

Photo by Shirin Behrad

Curator

Maryam Babaei is a writer and curator based in Vancouver. She holds a BA in English Literature and Art History from the University of British Columbia and an MSc in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research interests include the representations of time and memory as a means of socio-political critique in contemporary theatre and visual arts. Babaei is Curator at VIVA Alliance. 

Executive Director

Shadi Shadbahr is a Vancouver-based cultural worker, gallery director, and curator whose practice focuses on revitalizing community engagement with the arts—particularly within the field of immigrant and diasporic artistic practices—to create more equitable means of representation for artists across these contexts. She is currently the Founder and Executive Director of VIVA (Vancouver’s Iranian Visual Arts) Alliance, where she leads artistic initiatives and programming that support not only Iranian Canadian artists but also a wider community of underrepresented practitioners within Vancouver’s richly diverse cultural landscape. Through exhibitions, artist talks, and cross-institutional collaborations, she provides opportunities for artists to connect with the public and with broader artistic networks. Her recent projects include directing and co-curating exhibitions such as Unveiling Honour, An Evolving Aesthetics of Interruption, and Of Wounds and Songs—a collaborative exhibition with Two Rivers Gallery, a public gallery in Prince George, BC— that brings together artists whose practices engage with themes of displacement, resilience, and individual agency. 

Born in 1982 in Tehran, Iran, Shadbahr immigrated to Canada in 2002. She began her formal art education in painting at Alzahra University before continuing her academic journey in Vancouver, where she earned a BSc in Biology from the University of British Columbia and a BSN from the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). Her cross-disciplinary background and ongoing research into the histories of Iranian diasporic art inform her work, which responds to the pressing need to amplify immigrant and diasporic artistic practices and aims to reshape access and representation for artists locally. Her overlapping roles give shape to a practice deeply invested in cultivating inclusive, community-anchored platforms where cultural exchange, critical reflection, and creative possibility are not only encouraged, but continually reimagined.