Neven Lochhead is an artist, filmmaker, curator, educator and PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial studies program. His research and theoretical writing examine the relation between art and knowledge, the open possibilities of curatorial education, and artist-led pedagogy and workshops.

Prior to beginning his degree at Queen’s University in 2020, he worked as Director of Programming at SAW Video Media Art Centre from 2016-2020. At SAW, he founded and operated Knot Project Space – a discursive venue through which he engaged local, national, and international artists to present a series of interrelated exhibitions, performances, lectures, learning contexts, residency platforms, and off-site public art projects. Central to his curatorial practice is a pursuit of how exhibition-making acts as a tool for creating novel forms of collective inquiry, and generates vocabularies that can expand an organisation’s operational structures and imaginative capacities.

As an artist, he often works collaboratively with other artists, writers, and theorists, including the artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he produced various moving image works from 2017-2022, which were presented at Toronto Biennial of Art, SFMOMA, New Museum, Tate Modern and other institutions. His solo exhibition at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, From the vibe out (2021) took shape as a video installation, four-part radio art program, music album, online performance and learning platform. The exhibition explored a quasi-fictional archive of “grey literature” belonging to an imagined artist-led research institute in Kingston. Other projects with Agnes Etherington include the co-curated exhibition a guest + a host = a ghost (2022), for which he designed an artistic learning platform called Paranormal Curation, and which won Exhibition of the Year at Galeries Ontario Galleries awards in 2022.

As an educator, through two Teaching Fellowships at Queen’s in 2021 and 2023, he developed an undergraduate course, Sound + Synthesis, at the Department of Film and Media, which attends to sound as an integral but often overlooked aspect of film and video production and reception. In 2022, Lochhead was awarded a grant from Queen’s University Library to develop his course into an Open Educational Resource, and he subsequently received the Dean’s Teaching Fellow Award in 2023, in recognition of innovative curriculum design and teaching excellence.

Ongoing and forthcoming creative projects include two related documentaries with artist, curator, and writer Dylan Robinson on the repatriation of Indigenous songs, and processes of redress stemming from their appropriation and incarceration in museum collection spaces. He is elsewhere experimenting with the contractual dynamics of “bookings” as a vehicle for examining organizational and infrastructural behaviour.

C O N T A C T

neven.lochhead [at] gmail.com