Past & Present: Lost in Translation

Past & Present: Lost in Translation

Friday, December 04, 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Virtual Panel via YouTube

Join Onsite Gallery for a thought-provoking virtual panel featuring Alize Zorlutuna, Richa Narvekar, Dedra McDermottand others exploring how artists draw on cultural traditions, ancestral knowledge, and diasporic ways of knowing to shape contemporary creative practices. The discussion will focus on how visual art, dance, design, storytelling, and material practices can reinterpret cultural knowledge while creating new relationships to memory, identity, land, material culture, and the more-than-human. The panelists will share how their practices engage with inherited traditions, not simply as forms to preserve, but as living sources for experimentation, reclamation, and new ways of understanding the present.

Stay involved with a live Q&A session, moderated by Onsite Gallery’s Programs & Community Coordinator, Susan Jama.

ASL Interpretation will be available.

The panel is live-streamed via YouTube

Visit Registration Page

About the Panelists

Alize Zorlutuna is a queer interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose practice explores relationships between land, material culture, and the more-than-human through diasporic ways of knowing. Moving between Tkarónto and Anatolia has cultivated an attentiveness to sites of encounter, where bodies, geographies, and elemental forces meet in ongoing processes of negotiation and co-becoming. Drawing on material and relational traditions from the SWANA region, their work spans video, installation, ebru (Anatolian water marbling), ceramics, textiles, and participatory practice, bringing together diverse materials, methods, and geographies to consider place, memory, and relation.

Richa Narvekar is an Architectural Designer and Visual Artist that is interested in the connect between Art, Architecture, Urban and Interior Design. She earned her Bachelors in Architecture at CEPT University, India and was a British Council scholar to the Masters in Architecture, Urban Design program at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, UK. She is a registered Architect under the Council of Architecture, India and holds 15+ years of experience across India and Canada. Her practice, based out of Toronto, Canada and Goa, India is multidisciplinary, with a focus on projects in Interior Design. She has led several interior design and build projects as a Senior Designer for firms in the Greater Toronto Area. She is also involved with sustainable architectural projects and community focused art and urban initiatives in both Canada and India. Her work is centered on an exploration of vernacular, critical regionalist, decolonial and anti-capitalist approaches to material and ways of making.

Dedra McDermott is a Black artist-researcher, curator, producer, movement dramaturg, and cultural steward working at the intersection of choreographic performance, archival practice, and visual culture. Following a successful career as a professional contemporary dancer across stage and screen, two significant concussions in 2018 catalyzed a profound pivot toward creative leadership. Since then, Dedra has charted a rapid, wide-ranging trajectory, navigating a nimble transition from emerging to mid-career practice. Grounded by a multifaceted academic foundation (BFA ’16, MA ’20, MFA ’24), her cross-disciplinary work champions racialized artists navigating complex creative processes. As an evolving arts leader, she supports creators re-educating the public on global Indigeneity and Black diasporic histories across Latin America and the Caribbean. Dedra is one of the former Co-Executive Artistic Producers of DanceWorks (2023–25). During her tenure, she curated and produced over 15 live presentations and choreographic development programs, while leading access-based initiatives for hard-of-hearing and d/Deaf audiences alongside community partners like VibraFusionLab. As a cultural steward who values the art of gathering, Dedra works equitably to bring a diverse public together—creating the conditions for deeper cultural connection and appreciation.

About the Moderator

Susan Jama is an art worker with over 6 years of experience leading community engagement and public arts programming with strong grassroots experience. She is the Programs and Community Coordinator at Onsite Gallery. Susan has worked with various institutions that approach heritage in a community-minded manner including Toronto Ward Museum (TWM) and Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue Gallery & Cultural Centre (BAND). She graduated with a Masters of Museum Studies from University of Toronto and completed her Bachelor in Psychology & History at York University. She currently serves on the Museum Education Roundtable board as co-treasurer.