This year’s participating artists span painting, sculpture, mural work, and interdisciplinary practices, reflecting diverse cultural backgrounds and lived experiences. Their work engages with themes of identity, relocation, material transformation, and contemporary life, offering insight into the evolving landscape of global contemporary art.

Iraqi–American artist based in Istanbul, Sousan Alwan works with figurative painting to examine questions of identity, femininity, and resilience. Her work reflects the experience of navigating multiple cultural frameworks, where the figure becomes a site for negotiating visibility, autonomy, and self-definition.

Opeyemi Matthew Olukotun brings a practice rooted in portraiture and lived experience between Nigeria and Canada. His paintings reflect relocation and adaptation, exploring how identity is shaped through movement, memory, and shifting cultural environments.

Based in Vancouver, Kelcy Timmons Chan works through mural and pop-inspired visual language to reflect everyday cultural symbols, food, and shared spaces. Her practice considers how community and identity are formed through lived experience within urban environments, particularly within diasporic and queer contexts.

Working in sculpture and mixed media, Jorge Izaza explores how material, light, and surface interact. His work uses wood, resin, glass, and natural materials to construct forms that shift with their surroundings, emphasizing how physical transformation shapes perception and spatial experience.