Tania Cañas
Tania Cañas is a Salvadoran-born artist-researcher and Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Western University with the Surviving Memory project. Cañas was forcibly displaced by the Civil War in El Salvador and, as a result, grew up in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Kulin territory. Cañas’ work looks at socially engaged and community-led creative practices as sites of collaboration, modalities of resistance, and ways to rethink processes and recast institutions. She curated the exhibition "ISTHMUS," which brought together Central American artists in Australia and artists based in Central America. She has published on this through publications such as "Constructing Absence: Enforced Temporariness in the Destruction of a Salvadoran Community Mural" (2022). Most recently, she collaborated with Hoang Tran Nguyen for the performance video work Revolución y desplazamiento: entre El Salvador y Australia [Revolution and displacement: Between El Salvador and Australia] (2022), that featured as part of the exhibition Ístmicas: Bicentenario desde abajo [Isthmic: Bicentennial from below], at the "9a Conferencia Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Ciencias Sociales", in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Cañas is the founder of Archivando el Presente [Archiving the Present], a community archive project that looks at remembering as a creative practice from a Central American perspective. She also recently edited Staging Asylum, Again (2024), an anthology of plays about Australia’s border regime through Currency Press Australia.