Artengine is thrilled to present New Suns, an exhibition born from a groundbreaking collective worldbuilding lab. This project brought together an interdisciplinary group of eight artists to explore radical futures through art and speculative fiction, guided by renowned science fiction author Suyi Davies Okungbowa.
The New Suns lab was designed as a space for expansive, collaborative creation, emphasizing generosity, inclusivity, and wild imagination. Participants engaged in an intensive weekend of lectures, workshops, and discussions to collectively construct a shared world. From this shared foundation, each artist then developed individual works, offering diverse perspectives within a unified vision.
A core theme that emerged from this collaborative process is the reconstitution of the body and our physicality to embrace a plurality of species, fostering a more integrated, adaptive, and attuned relationship with the world. Artists grappled with concepts like the future of scientific outputs and their adaptation by society, moving beyond current technical limitations to explore widespread accessibility – even considering coin-operated 3D bioprinters for organoids and tissues in a future where these technologies are commonplace.
The exhibition also delves into fundamental aspects of human existence, such as food production and agriculture in speculative futures, pushing beyond traditional narratives to consider how communities might sustain themselves in radically reimagined worlds. One particularly imaginative concept explored is a group of people who have spliced their genetics with earthworms, forming sentient clusters that aerate soil for their crops at night, embodying a profound connection to their environment.
At its heart, New Suns champions the idea of utilizing existing knowledge and internal experiences to forge new connections between consciousness and imagination. The artists explore the sensory experience of living in these imagined futures, down to the minutia of daily life in a post-human or connected ecological framework.
Crucially, New Suns seeks to move beyond the limitations of dystopian narratives. The project embraces a radical optimism, dreaming beyond uninteresting violence and challenging us to consider the powerful role of speculative futurism in shaping our reality. The collective work envisions a future where power structures are transformed into systems of care and mutual aid, not out of obligation, but as the natural order of things. This radical idea explores ways of living together in collective well-being, offering visions that are neither purely utopian nor dystopian, but deeply profound in their potential for transformative change.
Come experience the imaginative possibilities of New Suns and witness how art and speculative fiction can serve as a powerful method for reimagining and reshaping our world.
Featured artists in the New Suns exhibition include: WhiteFeather Hunter, Seth Thomson, Emily Pelstring & Naomi Okabe, Kemi Craig, Eva Grant, Melanie Barnett, and Kriss Li, with a captivating soundscape by Ben Globerman.
Exhibition Details: Location: 67 Nicholas @ Artengine Dates: June 7th – 20th
Opening Event: June 7th
Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter is a Canadian artist-researcher and SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology. With a PhD in Biological Art from SymbioticA (The University of Western Australia), her practice fuses feminist technoscience, craft-based methodologies, and regenerative medicine to reimagine relationships between bodies, materials, and institutions. WhiteFeather’s current project for NEW SUNS, IMARA: Interstitial Machine for Aggregate Reparative Anatomies, is a hacked bioprinter installation that fabricates speculative, multi-speciated tissues in response to cryodamage. Developed through additional support from the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (Alarcón Lab), IMARA is a living thought-experiment in DIY biofabrication, queer reparation, and posthuman adaptation. Dr. Hunter’s work has been presented in galleries, conferences, and journals worldwide, and is guided by the belief that the future is fluid, and always in formation.
Emily Pelstring is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. Her creative work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. She uses surreal and idiosyncratic storytelling to explore links between technology, spirituality, and illusion, bringing together interests in reclaimative myth-making, speculative futurisms, and camp aesthetics. Her animations and installations incorporate analog and digital effects processes. Emily is engaged in ongoing artistic collaborations with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline under the moniker The Powers, and was a core organizer of an international symposium called The Witch Institute.
Eva Grant is a filmmaker, artist, and designer from British Columbia. She is a graduate of Stanford University, a former Sundance Institute Fellow, a NEW SUNS Worldbuilding Lab fellow, and a member of the research-creation group ORGANISMO. She creates universes informed by new ecologies, hybrid narratives, Land Defence, machine learning, and data visualization. She has a strong interest in time-bending audio-visual works that examine Indigenous land-based and cosmological teachings within a digital era, in the hopes of prototyping visions of a shared world that transcends boundaries and dissolves borders. This is her second Pique, as she was a guest curator (“The Land Wants You Back”) through the Indigenous Curatorial Collective in September 2024.
Naomi Okabe is a media artist, writer, and creative researcher interested in science fiction and sociotechnical imaginaries of caring labour. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies (Film and Media, Queen’s University), where she is thinking about motherhood and technologies of care, environmental media, and outer space futures. Naomi’s films have premiered at festivals such as Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival and Kingston Canadian Film Festival, and her writing has been published by Silver Press, Mattering Press, and KOSMICA Magazine. Naomi also co-runs Séance Centre, a record label and publisher.
Melanie Barnett is a ceramicist whose work draws upon themes of mycology, agronomy, and climate science to create sci-fi worldbuilding experiences that speculate upon the future. She holds an MFA from NSCAD University (2024) and a BFA Honours in Ceramics from IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art, Brandon University (2021).
Melanie’s work has been included in national and international publications, and has been exhibited across Canada. Her work has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (2024), The Elizabeth Greenshield’s Foundation Grant (2022), the Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship (2023), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada Graduate Scholarship-Masters (2023). Barnett was the recipient of the Governor Generals Gold medal in Academic Excellence (2024) awarded at NSCAD University.
Seth Thomson is an Ottawa-based creative technologist and theatre designer. Their practice is concerned with urban eco-futurism and the capacity of art to install tangible transformative change. Their creative work has been supported by the Digital Artists Resource Center, OFFTA and the National Arts Center. Recent credits include lighting design for Trip The Light Theatre’s Nuit and co-creation of EXA, an immersive tarot-reading experience.
Kemi Craig (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working through dance, analogue film and media installations based in the Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. Through her lived experience as a woman of African descent, Kemi’s art utilizes movement, materiality and new media to center experiences for people with racialized and gendered bodies. She is inspired by Black histories, contemporary Black experiences and their relationships to Afrofuturism and Hauntology; as well as embodied knowledge and how it is enacted everyday through social choreographies of our bodies. With a belief that audiences are active participants who close the circle of creation in any work, she strives to amplify engagement through collective making and collaboration. Her work draws complex relationships between cultural production, identity and lived experiences using methods that are site-specific, multi-sensory and immersive.
Kemi is a graduate from the Emily Carr University of Art Design with a Masters degree in Fine Art. Since graduating she has exhibited and performed through arts centers and galleries across BC and Canada. Additionally, she has worked as a programmer, artist educator, mentor and curator. For three years, Kemi was the Artist in Residence with Dance Victoria and has just completed her two year term with the City of Victoria as the Artist in Residence.
Kriss Li is a multimedia artist who creates films, installations, and collaborations that explore structures of power. These works investigate the foundational divisions and hierarchies that maintain our social order—the ways these systems condition us in spite of our intentions, and the hidden sites of possibility that we can exploit towards greater collective capacities.
Kriss’s work has been shown at over 100 festivals globally, including screenings at DOC NYC, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Images Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Videoformes International Digital Arts Festival, International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, and Laceno d’Oro.
Ben Globerman is a musician, sound designer, and multimedia artist. He has composed works for film, theatre, and specializes in developing multi-channel audio installations – working on projects for hospitals, fashion shows, and public transit. Ben’s work uses sound to manipulate physical spaces creating engaging and kinetic experiences for audiences. He produces conceptually driven audio and video installations working with up to ten speakers, choral arrangements, and performs in spatial audio. His works have been shown in City Halls and private galleries alike, and his installations have tackled themes of religious pluralism, bleeding-edge technology, and the therapeutic qualities of sound. Ben holds an MA in European Studies (Carleton University) with a focus on international migration, and a BA in Religious Studies (Carleton University), and is a graduate from the Red Bull Music Academy (New York, USA).