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About Us

a space to create art about surveillance centred around care and compassion

Surveillance as a method of control disproportionately targets 2SLGBTQIA+, Indigenous, racialized, and disabled peoples.

 

How we create art about surveillance matters. 

surveillART is a research-creation "care"-lab at Carleton University dedicated to disrupting the colonial, western, heteronormative, and oppressive systems of surveillance through experimental and media based art. Specifically, using surveillance technology and equipment ethically and care-fully to resist their original violent and coercive functions. 

surveillART provides artists, scholars, students, and community members the resources and space to experiment with themes of surveillance and art, in critical and disruptive ways. Some of which may come in forms of play, pleasure, healing, care-laboration, and community engaged art.

​Here, we prioritize accessibility, equitable access to industry grade software and equipment, and provide spaces for emerging and professional artists and curators to create and exhibit their work. 

 

At its core, surveillance is an extractive system of power and colonialism that dehumanizes and violently dispossesses equity deserving people across the world. The care-lab reimagines how artist-scholars co-create art about surveillance, in transformative, just, and care centric ways, to bring care back into care-less places.

 Research Team

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Director

Dr. Stéfy McKnight

they/them/iel

stefy.mcknight (@) carleton.ca

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Research Assistant 

nilofer rauha 

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nilofer rauha is a South Asian artist-researcher living on Anishinabe Algonquin territory. nilofer is a current PhD student at Carleton University in the Cultural Mediations program. Their interdisciplinary scholarship interrogates identity as a site of cultural production, and affective resistance and art within the Imperial Core. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist and queer thought, performance studies, surveillance studies, and South Asian studies, nilofer's work explores nontraditional academia and art as a mode of research. 

 

Before starting at Carleton, nilofer earned a Bachelor's of Fine Arts and a Master's in Contemporary Art Theory at the University of Ottawa. 

Community User Experience Expert 

Nataly Hilan

Nataly Hilan is a Syrian-Canadian Media Production and Design graduate from Carleton University who focuses on UX/UI design and research. She is passionate about creating digital experiences that reduce overwhelm and make information easier to navigate, with a focus on inclusive and intuitive design.

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Branding Ambassador

Karina Szubert

she/her

Karina Szubert is a Media Production and Design student passionate about creating projects that tell meaningful stories. Through film, animation, and interactive media, she explores how design can inspire connection.

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Branding Ambassador

Mackenzie Charbonneau

she/her

Mackenzie Charbonneau is a Polish-Canadian undergraduate Media Production and Design student at Carleton University with a minor in Digital Humanities. Specializing in graphic design, she blends thoughtful design with community storytelling, highlighting voices that are overlooked in mainstream media.

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Branding Ambassador

Abdelrahman Abuzeinah

he/him

Abdelrahman Abuzeinah is a Palestinian Canadian undergraduate Media Production and Design student. He is a creative storyteller who loves film storytelling, graphic design, and podcasting.

Artist Advisory Board

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Artist & Educator

Alejandro Arauz

Alejandro Arauz is an artist and educator whose research-based studio practice investigates displacement, identity, and resistance within the Latin American diaspora. Working across printmaking, digital imaging, performance, and installation, his work examines how migration reshapes the body, memory, and material culture, foregrounding processes of adaptation, resilience, conservation, and sentimentality. Drawing on lived experience and diasporic histories, Arauz engages traditional and expanded print methodologies to explore how images and material practices articulate shifting formations of belonging. Arauz’s practice is grounded in print as praxis and in the embodied conditions of making. He approaches print not as a stable medium of reproduction but as a durational, performative, and relational process through which meaning is generated. Central to his work is fugitivity as a conceptual framework: a mode of practice that resists fixity, embraces provisionality, and refuses closure. Through strategies of inscription, erasure, layering, delegation, and repetition, he situates printmaking as a fugitive methodology that registers movement across media and parallels the instability of diasporic subjectivity. His frequent use of the body as a printmaking matrix, alongside hybrid analog–digital workflows, foregrounds the body as both archive and site of inscription, exposing how identities are constructed, fragmented, and circulated through institutional and technological systems. A key dimension of Arauz’s practice is his sustained engagement with print performance and time-based processes. He experiments with relief print, pressure, and registration to generate photographic qualities - such as trace, exposure, and indexicality - using print as a lens to parallel adaptation and transformation. These works treat printing as a performative encounter, where the interaction between body, matrix, and surface becomes a record of movement, friction, and negotiation. Arauz also examines the role of print in surveilling and regulating the body, interrogating how print technologies tied to documentation and classification function as tools of visibility and discipline, while repurposing them as sites of refusal and counter-inscription. By reworking institutional and archival visual languages, his practice questions how bodies are rendered legible, tracked, and reproduced, and how these processes might be disrupted through material intervention. Collaboration and community-based production are integral to his practice. Arauz treats authorship as distributed and processual rather than individual and fixed, emphasizing collective labor, technical knowledge-sharing, and co-production. He is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University. He holds an MFA from Louisiana State University and a BFA from the University of Windsor.

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Artist

Khalil Talhaoui

he/him

Khalil Talhaoui ( He/ Him ) is a Moroccan-French artist and PhD candidate in Security, Conflict and Human Rights at the University of Exeter. He is also training as a criminologist at the University of Barcelona. His research looks at blackmail, framing, and technological practices within the Palestinian context — specifically how blackmail operates as a tool of control under settler colonialism, with a focus on Israeli practices in Palestine. The work sits between settler colonial studies and critical security studies, and uses investigative aesthetics — visuality and visualization — as ways of producing situated and liberatory knowledge. Poetry is Khalil's primary artistic medium, alongside photography. His work moves through prophetic traditions, memory, and resistance, touching on anti-imperialism, Pan-Africanism, queer in/securities, and technological surveillance. He has given talks or shown his work at Círculo de Bellas Artes and Casa Árabe in Madrid, the Palestinian Liberatory Book Fair and Goethe University in Frankfurt, Namnam Space in Tokyo, the 10th Biennial Surveillance Studies Network in Ljubljana, Carleton University in Ottawa, and Artorium in Casablanca.

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Artist

Taylor Jolin

she/her

Taylor Jolin (she/her) is an Ojibwe visual artist, photographer, graphic designer, and fabricator based in Bawaating (Sault Ste. Marie, ON), and Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg. Her multidisciplinary practice spans art, installation, community-based media, and construction, focusing on non-verbal communication, land and territory, and the ethics of looking. She earned a BFA from Algoma University in 2016 and currently serves as the Studio Technician for the university’s Visual Arts program. Jolin's work has been exhibited locally and across Ontario. She contributes design for various initiatives, including Youth Climate Corps Toronto, the Ontario Indigenous Youth Partnership Project, Youth Opportunities Fund, and other Indigenous youth-led projects. She has supported arts programming, workshops, and exhibitions in Northern Ontario and was previously on the board of 180 Projects, an artist-run centre and experimental gallery in Sault Ste. Marie. In 2019, Jolin assisted with coordinating the Dream Big Indigenous Arts Festival, organized by the Northern Indigenous Artist Alliance. She is a contributing author to the forthcoming book Surveillance Logics in Contemporary Art: Visions of Territory, Carcerality, and Resistance (UBC Press) and an advisor on the accompanying SSHRC Insight Grant project, Watching Territory. Jolin recently completed the book design for Lori Blondeau: I’m Not Your Kinda Princess (Plug In ICA). Her recent recognition includes the 2024 Strive Arts & Culture Industry Award. In 2025, she helped create, curate, and install artwork throughout the Algoma District Cancer Program. Jolin sits on the Indigenous Advisory Committee for Thunderhead, the national 2SLGBTQIA+ monument slated for completion in Ottawa in August 2026.

https://www.taylorjolin.ca/ IG @catsandneutrals

Past Research Team Members

Kayleigh Lewis

2024-2025

MA student

Carleton University

Shelna Matheis

2024-2025

Undergraduate student

Carleton University

Adrienne Prawl

2024-2025

Undergraduate student

Carleton University

surveillART: 

care-laboratory for research-creation & disruptive exhibitionism

surveillART is funded by the Canada Foundation of Innovation and Ontario Research Fund Research Infrastructure

1105 Dunton Tower

Carleton University

1125 Colonel By Drive

Ottawa, ON

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surveillART and Carleton University are located on the unsurrendered and unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. 

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© 2026 by surveillART. 

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