Founded in 2019, CIF began as a collaboration between the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with funding from the UBC Public Humanities Hub in 2020. In 2024, CIF formed as a Research Excellence Cluster at UBC, and supports a network of programs, learning, public engagement, and research with collaborators and partners throughout the Lower Mainland. CIF currently includes members from UBC’s Departments of Journalism, History, Theatre and Film, English, Visual Art, Media Studies, Art History, Geography, and Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, locally at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, and Emily Carr University, The Polygon Gallery, and Capture Photography Festival. We work with research associates from cultural and community organizations as well as Universities across Canada.
We seek to share research materials that span academic and general interest, and create and maintain an accessible web-based archive of discussions, interviews and lectures that can be used for teaching, learning, and research at UBC and beyond. Critical Image Forum recognizes the ways that research occurs both within and outside of institutional boundaries. We support research that connects with social and racial justice, visual art and cultural theory, political histories and anti-colonial methodologies, and recognize that researchers may work primarily outside of institutional contexts or recognition.
The work we do is not only informed by the context of working at the Point Grey UBC Camus on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory, a territory that has been cared for since time immemorial by xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nation, but informed by the rich history and ongoing future image-based research and knowledge that has taken place here. We recognize that, since contact, photography has been used as a tool of oppression, and seek to more fully understand the ways that expanded image-based practices have been and are actively used as methods to express sovereignty and empowerment.
