Pausa Group

Atanas Bozdarov is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who focuses on deconstructing the ways in which we read and interpret systems and structures. From quoting fragments of architectural blueprints or game sequences, to generating musical motifs from non-musical sources, he constructs incomplete and surprising structures in order to question our understanding of the working systems around us.

Aydan Hasanova is an emerging interdisciplinary artist, animator and visual designer based in Toronto. They hold an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Design and Media from OCAD University. Their research explores cultural theory, Soviet cinema, visuality and feminism. Her artistic practice involves installation with found materials and projections of found film footage.

Elyse Longair is an, artist, curator and image theorist, currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. In 2021, Longair received her MFA from the Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design program at OCAD University. From 2020-2021, she was an RBC Emerging Artist at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Longair’s ‘simple image’ theory in collage re-imagines the role of images away from the overt-complexity that dominates our world, opening up new possibilities for imagined futures.

Émilie von Garan is a bilingual Toronto based critical writer and researcher exploring the intersection of the body, technology, and architecture in film and moving image art. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Concordia University in Montreal and holds a Masters of Arts from Toronto’s OCAD University. She is now a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at the University of Toronto. Her interests include continental philosophy, horror theory, art criticism, and the ways in which art and horror share aesthetic, structural, and conceptual strategies. Her dissertation explores the instability of the gaze in post-war Italian cinema through the works of filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Dario Argento.

Emily Dickson is a second year PhD student at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at Western University. Her research at present entails recovering formalist art histories, and delivering them into the present. Her recent publications include “Moving at the Speed of Trust: On Teaching Social Practice” for C Magazine, and “Object-hood’s Indecencies: Tilted Arc and the Lessons Learnt in Breakdown” for Open Philosophy.

Julian Jason Haladyn is an art historian, cultural theorist and Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto. His writings on art and theory have appeared in numerous publications. He is the author of several books, including The Hypothetical (2020), Duchamp, Aesthetics, and Capitalism (2019),Aganetha Dyck: The Power of the Small (2017), Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will To Boredom (2014) and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (2010). In addition, he has co-edited Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art, 1977-1990 (with Janice Gurney 2022) and the Boredom Studies Reader (with Michael E. Gardiner 2016).

Jevi (Jevonne Peters) is a theorist, researcher, developer, and experimental inter-disciplinary artist. Her theoretical and research-creation practice explores our individual and societal relationships with technology; privacy; governance; immersion; and speculative fiction.

Kashfia Arif is a cultural scholar, writer, editor and curator. She holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and an MA in Critical Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS, University of London. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she has presented on Korean fanculture, Japanese visual culture and South Asian art initiatives in international conferences and her recent publications include the chapter “Looking at Fan Identity: The Bangladeshi K-pop Fan” in Korean Wave in South Asia: Transcultural Flow, Fandom and Identity. Arif’s curatorial research interests include narration and storytelling, memory and trauma, catharsis and healing, humour, graffiti, and memes. She works remotely as an editor with Brihatta Art Foundation, a Bangladeshi art collective, most recently working for Dhaka Art Summit 2023. Her next adventure is pursuing her PhD in Criticism and Theory at Western University researching post-memory, Bangladeshi art history and contemporary visual culture.

Maxwell Hyett is a writer, artist and theorist currently completing his PhD at The Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at Western University. His work explores modern and contemporary issues of the creative act, especially through the art and architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is particularly interested in questions of perception, possibility and fragmentation. Hyett’s publications include the essays “Use(ful/less) Schematics” in Drain 15.1 (2018), and “The Poking of Christ: Death, Fakes and the Digital” in tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture 1.1 (2019) and “Amateur Mortality” in Culture, Theory and Critique 61.4 (2020) as well as collaborative book reviews in Dada/Surrealism and Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. 

Only when standing in a river.

An inspirational and wall-eyed story-teller that briefly considered a lucrative book deal with PAUSA before being adopted by another publishing house, November 17th, 2022–November 23rd, 2022.

Marcel Duchamp was appointed a Pausa on March 16, 2022 as the group’s American correspondent.