Esther Shalev-Gerz (née Gilinksy) was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1948. Her family moved to Jerusalem in 1957, where she graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Since 1984, she shares her time between Paris and Cortes Island, BC. Internationally recognized for her significant contributions in the field of public art, photography and video, Shalev-Gerz investigates questions of memory, history, trauma, cultural identity and ethics in the contemporary world through her practice. Working in multiple media, from photographs and video installations to large-scale public commissions that merge architecture with landscape design, Shalev-Gerz’s monuments, installations and public sculptures are developed through active dialogue and consultation with people whose participation provides an emphasis on their individual and collective memories, accounts, opinions and experiences. In 2010 and 2012, two major retrospective exhibitions respectively displayed ten and fifteen of her installations, first in Jeu de Paume, Paris then in Musée des Beaux Arts de Lausanne. Space Between Time, her solo exhibition at Wasserman Projects, Detroit presented nine of her installations between April and July 2016. In 2017, a survey exhibition of her work was presented at the Serlachius Museum, Mantta, Finland. She has exhibited internationally in, amongst other places, San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Vancouver, Geneva, Guangzhou and New York. From the beginning of her career with landmark monuments such as Oil on Stone (1983) and The Monument Against Fascism (1986), Shalev-Gerz has designed and realized permanent installations in public space in Hamburg, Israel, Stockholm, Wanas, Geneva, Glasgow and now Vancouver. Her work has been represented in over twenty-five monographs. For more information about the artist, visit www.shalev-gerz.net

Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).