2023 University of Toronto MVS Studio Program Graduating Exhibition

The Art Museum, in partnership with the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, is pleased to exhibit the graduating projects of the 2023 Master of Visual Studies graduate students Durga Rajah, Nimisha Bhanot, Omolola Ajao, and Sarah Zanchetta.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS Studio degree in Visual Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

Durga Rajah is interested in the formal and material aspects of photography, and in its potential as a reflective medium. In her recent work, she explores performative strategies which imbricate subjecthood within the photographic process as she revaluates photography’s role as a medium of representation and artmaking. 

Nimisha Bhanot is a visual artist whose work challenges and critiques the socio-political role of women and femmes from an integrative bicultural perspective, accepting and rejecting aspects of South Asian and North American culture. Her current research interests take a step back by utilizing the personal archive as a starting point and investigating the complex, interwoven relationship between transitional objects, potential spaces, quotidian archival practices, and South Asian diasporic identity formation. Bhanot received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCADU in 2013. Her work has been profiled by BuzzFeed, BBC, Huffington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and CBC Arts, among others.

Omolola Ajao is a Nigerian-Canadian filmmaker and video artist. Her work forms upon the vastness of Black migratory life, often conceiving from subjectivity. She embraces Black reality as means of endless imagination, exploration, and excavation; often playing within form, rhythm, and narrative to speculate upon migratory presence. Her artistic works contend with visuality and voice and have been presented internationally. Her prescient work endeavours to challenge and fissure the anticipated narratives of video-ed and documented Black life. She is a Union Doc Fellow, Hot Docs Fellow, and a TIFF Accelerator Fellow.

Sarah Zanchetta is a textile artist and writer. Her curiosity-driven practice researches and questions the loss of knowledge in connection to the land and plants which surround us, specifically our fringed relationship with poisonous plants.