Moez Surani

Moez Surani’s writing has been published internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Best Canadian Poetry (2013 & 2014), and the Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported research in India and East Africa, and he has been an artist-in-residence in Finland, Italy, Latvia, Myanmar, Switzerland, Taiwan, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and at the MacDowell Colony in the United States. His visual and performance works have been shown in Toronto at Theatre Passe Muraille, Nuit Blanche, Videofag, Red Head Gallery and YYZ Artists’ Outlet (forthcoming), and internationally at the Cross Gallery in Taipei, the New Zero Arts Space in Yangon, Palazzolo Acreide’s city hall in Italy and he is a member of the artist-run centre Gallery 44 in Toronto. He is the author of three poetry books: Reticent Bodies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2009), Floating Life (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), and Operations (Book*hug, 2016), which is comprised of the names of military operations, and reveals a globe-spanning inventory of the contemporary rhetoric of violence. A new collection of poetry, Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real (Book*hug, 2019) was published in fall 2019. Most recently, he has been working on Heresies, a collaboration with Canadian artist Nina Leo, and a group of international perfumers, to produce a line of custom scents that operate as lyric poems and express diverse and suppressed subjectivities. Heresies was part of a winter 2018 exhibition (curated by Lisa Deanne Smith) at the Onsite Gallery in Toronto. In an investigation of mediation, image and contemporary politics, he is currently collaborating with Nina Leo on a collection of installation work, which includes Lullabies for a Waning Empire and The Irrefutable Border series.

Moez is a 2021 GTA mentor and worked with Daniel Maluka.