For 2025–2026, the Emerging Curator Residency Program is taking a moment to pause and reflect so that we can focus on catching up with iterations of the program’s current and past projects, and to consider the nature of the program and ask how it can better approach the demands of current concerns in the expanded field of curatorial and architectural investigations. We want to rethink the program in order for it to be more responsive to the questions and discourses in the discipline today. Applications will reopen in January 2026, which will be the fifteenth year of the program. In the meantime, both our Curatorial Internships Program and Curatorial Photography Internship Program open on 3 February. We are excited to share more on our current and upcoming developments in these curatorial programs.

Andy Lu Lee has been selected for our 2024-2025 CCA Emerging Curator Residency Program. The curatorial project, American Re-mediation, investigates the constructed and projected nature of the American landscape through archival and film media. The project explores how Cold War-era US Department of the Interior films shaped and constructed the perception of American infrastructure abroad. These films portrayed US projects as symbols of consumerism and desire, veiling their role in advancing settler-colonial and extractivist agendas. By revisiting and re-presenting this archival footage in dialogue with contemporary film from Mexico and Colombia, American Re-mediation invites critical discourse vis-à-vis questions concerning the environment and coloniality.

Currently, we are working with Yutong Lin, the 2023-2024 CCA Emerging Curator, on a Singles publication on the Zomia region of the Himalayas, that investigates questions concerning trans-Himalayan geography through the study of plants, landscapes, and ways of habitation posed through structures of translation. Through collaborative bookmaking and publishing practices, Lin’s work engages in dialogue with artists, linguists, and writers from the region, utilizing differing practices of translation as a tool to access larger debates on landscape, history, memory, and archival practices.

Last year, we finalized 2022-2023 CCA Emerging Curator Clarissa Lim Kye Lee’s curatorial project in Malaysia and Montréal, Making Mamak: Collective Ecologies of Urban Space. Lim held a series of workshops in Kuala Lumpur, which – through collective mapping practices – engaged with arts collectives in the region to develop a “blueprint” to be shared between art and cultural workers globally. These workshops looked to Malaysian collective ecologies and their relationship to their urban environments for ways to reinscribe a concern for the social in contemporary art and architecture. The findings were shared with Montréal-based arts collectives in a public event at the CCA last August.