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.
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surveillART is a research-creation 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.
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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.
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​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 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.
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Research Team
Director
Dr. Stéfy McKnight
they/them/iel
stefy.mcknight (@) Carleton.ca
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Research Assistant
nilofer rauha
any/all pronouns​​
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.
Past Research Team Members
Kayleigh Lewis
2024-2025
MA student
Carleton University
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Shelna Matheis
2024-2025
Undergraduate student
Carleton University
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Adrienne Prawl
2024-2025
Undergraduate student
Carleton University
