Critical Image Forum supports researchers, undergraduate and grad students by providing resources to deepen and expand their practices
Catherine Clement - Research
Catherine Clement is an awarding-winning community historian, author and curator. Her work focuses on excavating the lesser-known and forgotten stories of the Chinese Canadian experience. While her surname is French, Catherine’s mother was Chinese. Catherine’s historical projects have involved significant crowdsourcing of stories and material that help uncover the experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Her interest is in “memory” and how it can help both reveal and preserve stories and objects that may otherwise be ignored or discarded.
In 2023, Catherine created and curated the national public history project The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. Designed to commemorate the 100th-anniversary of this dark but largely unknown period in Canadian history, her landmark exhibition opened on July 1, 2023 in the new Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver. The exhibition displayed the largest collection of early Chinese head tax and related identity/surveillance documents ever shown publicly. These documents, as well as the lost stories, were gathered from hundreds of families across Canada. Catherine then repurposed this crowdsourced material to establish The Paper Trail Collection, the most comprehensive community archive in Canada of Chinese head tax and related documents. The online collection is housed at the University of British Columbia Library, Rare Books and Special Collections. Finally, her book titled “The Paper Trail to 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act,” was published by Plumleaf Press in the summer of 2025. The Paper Trail project has won numerous history and heritage awards. And in 2024, it was short-listed for a Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming. Prior to The Paper Trail project, Catherine was best known for her 10-year search uncovering the hidden works of Yucho Chow, Vancouver’s first and most prolific Chinese photographer. She uncovered his photographs one family at a time, one story at a time. Her research revealed that Chow not only documented the lives of early Chinese, but he was the favourite photographer of the marginalized and non-white communities. That project resulted in an exhibition of crowd-sourced materials in 2019, a book in 2020, and a comprehensive community archive of over 600 private photos taken by Yucho Chow. Catherine’s book Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow was awarded the prestigious 2020 B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing and the 2020 Vancouver Book Award.
Jayden Emslie - Photo-based Project
Metis Nation of British Columbia
The idea of taking up space has always been something that has challenged me.I grew up in a small town where people outside of the central interior couldn’t pronounce the name or point it out on a map. It took me a while to feel comfortable telling people that I was at UBC for a “Bachelor of Media Studies with a Minor in First Nations and Indigenous Studies” instead of just saying “oh, I’m just doing a media degree.” It was easier than explaining the nuance and specific reasoning that went into those decisions – such as wanting to pursue something practical, yet creative, while incorporating Indigenous-centred frameworks in honour of my family that had that opportunity stripped from them. That subtle dynamic of smallness has followed me into what I create as a way to incorporate details that only I will completely understand, and that others can interpret for themselves. With this project, though, I address these details loudly.
The piece, titled TAKING UP SPACE, references both the literal and figurative, as a way for the portraits and my colleagues to take up space in areas where Indigenous women are historically and systemically unwelcome– the walls of an academic institution and within the fine-art photography sphere. TAKING UP SPACE has highlighted the strength of these collective individual experiences. I wanted to drive home that although we share the collective strength of being Indigenous women in academia, we are not a monolith of “Indigeneity” by breaking traditional rules of artistic photography that are typically built within Western-colonial systems that often cause harm to us. Reframing photography as a tool for connection, respect, recognition, and reciprocity, as opposed to extraction and control.
Sameena Siddiqui - Research
Sameena Siddiqui is an Associate Curator of Adult Programs at Surrey Art Gallery. She is also a Ph.D. candidate and SRSF doctoral fellow at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Canada. Siddiqui has presented her research at several international conferences and residencies and published in photography journals. Her dissertation research won the MFAH Joan and Stanford Alexander Dissertation Award, US, 2021.
Solange Adum Abdala - Practice-based research
Solange Adum Abdala (b. 1980, Peru. Based in Vancouver) is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Her practice engages with history and nature, conceiving landscape as the relationship between the body and spacetime. She explores photography as matter, code, and trace, in a «de/re/construction» where the layers of representation inscribed in the visible are reactivated. From there, she rethinks the photographic apparatus as a political technology of capture, fixation, and production. Her interest centers on the image, the imaginary, projection, and thought, understanding art as a means to speculate and explore diverse ways of relating to knowledge.
She has held five solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions, festivals, and art fairs across America, Europe, and Asia. She received First Prize at the III Salón de Fotografía del ICPNA (Peru), and has been the recipient of awards such as Concurso Eugenio Courret (Peru), Huéspedes del Presente (Spain), and NexoFoto (Brazil). In 2023, she was selected for the publication Collage: Women of the Prix Pictet since 2008.
In Vancouver, she was awarded the Affiliated Fellowships Master’s Program for researchers at the University of British Columbia (2024) and selected for the Launch Pad Program (2025) of the City of Vancouver. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia and two undergraduate degrees in Fotografía and Dirección de Proyectos Visuales y Fotografía (BFA) from Escuela Centro de la Imagen (Peru).
Violet Johnson - Practice-based research
Violet Johnson (b. 1999) is a mixed Native and Euro-American artist, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and a Yurok descendant. Johnson’s analogue photo-sculptural practice directly engages with bodies of waters along the Pacific Northwest Coast from Washington to California as a means of tracing significant sites and memories of her personal and familial histories.
