Curator Noor Alé joins artist Alize Zorlutuna for a conversation about the artworks, ideas, and activations featured in AGB’s We Who Have Known Many Shores exhibition.

Noor Alé is an independent curator, writer, and art historian. Previously, she was the Associate Curator at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, migration, and land relations as it pertains to the global majority. In her work, she adopts a transcultural lens to unearth convergences that generate solidarities, which in turn challenge ideological and geographical lines of division. She has worked at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Dubai; and the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington.

At The Power Plant, she curated Abdelkader Benchamma: Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss, Hiwa K: Do you remember what you are burning?, and Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT. Often working collaboratively, she was a co-curator of Anna Boghiguian: Time of Change, and the institutional curator for Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity. In her independent practice, she curated this is not an atlas, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington; Valentin Brown: Welcome to My Regulated Body, Art Windsor-Essex; and Here Comes the Sun, Art Gallery of Burlington.

Since 2016, she has shared a collaborative curatorial practice with Claudia Mattos. They are founders of AXIS, an independent curatorial laboratory dedicated to socially-engaged contemporary art. Together they have curated OF THE SACRED, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Toronto; The Falling Sky, Trinity Square Video, Toronto; and LAW & (DIS)ORDER at Vtape, Toronto. She was awarded curatorial residencies at SOMA, Mexico City; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Association of Art Museum Curators, New York; and the Shanghai Curators Lab.