Cheryl L'Hirondelle: where the voice touches (((acts, utterances, transmissions for freedom)))

Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family roots are from Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wāskahikan (Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, Alberta. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place to create immersive environments towards radical inclusion and decolonisation. As a songwriter, L’Hirondelle focuses on sharing nēhiyawēwin (Cree language) and Indigenous and contemporary hybrid song forms and Indigenous language sound shapes and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance. L'Hirondelle has performed, presented and exhibited nationally and internationally. L’Hirondelle was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 & 2006) and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 & 2007). L'Hirondelle also received the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. In 2025, she was bestowed an Honorary Doctorate from Queen’s University and the King’s Coronation Medal from the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. Her latest album released in October 2025 is Why the Caged Bird Sings, a collection of songs co-written with incarcerated women, men and detained youth from across the land now known as Canada and is available on all platforms.

https://www.cheryllhirondelle.com/

Tarah Hogue is a curator, writer, and cultural worker based in Treaty 6 and 7 territories and the Métis homeland. Her practice is grounded in relational geographies, attending to how people and artworks shape and are shaped by the territories they belong to and move through. She approaches curating as a form of generative inquiry and connection, where otherwise ways of knowing and being can emerge through encounters between artworks, spaces, and publics.

Hogue is currently Adjunct Curator (Indigenous Art) at Remai Modern and has curated independently since 2009 across a range of venues and collaborations. Her recent projects include Carried by rivers, held by lands (Remai Modern), co-curated with Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh, and Maria Lind—a multi-year initiative that brings together artists from across the northern hemisphere to think with place, build solidarities across distance, and pursue collaborative forms of cultural and environmental restitution. She is also co-curator, with Siri Engberg, of Dyani White Hawk: Love Language (Walker Art Center; Remai Modern), a major survey of fifteen years of the Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist’s practice.

Of Michif and Euro-Canadian ancestry, Hogue is a citizen of the Otipemisiwak Métis Government within Alberta.

Jacqueline Bell (she/her) is an Alberta-based curator and writer whose work engages contemporary artistic practices that foreground the politics of relationality. She currently serves as Director, Walter Phillips Gallery and Collections at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. At Banff Centre she has organized exhibitions, projects and events including Elliptical Lineages (2025); Dawn Chorus, Evensong (Bow River Valley) by Lou Sheppard (2024); Listening Devices (2024–ongoing); Cassils: Movement (2024), co-curated with Carol Stakenas; darkness is as deep as the darkness is by Rita McKeough (2020); A materialist history of contagion by Candice Lin (2019); Guidelines by Carmen Papalia with Heather Kai Smith (2019); THE CAVE by Young Joon Kwak with Marvin Astorga, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Adrian Stimson and Kim Ye (2018); If the river ran upwards (2018); and Everything I Say is True by Kite (2017). Her writing, reviews or interviews have been published by C Magazine, FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Criticism, PUBLIC and X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly. In 2021, her interview, Thinking through the River: A Conversation with Carolina Caycedo and Genevieve Robertson was published in Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art, edited by Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Douglas & McIntyre).