Rafael Zen
Articles by Rafael Zen

Dialogues with wounded hearts: is it possible to transcend pain through art?
June 21 2021 CulturePhoto courtesy of Indian Summer Fest
The pandemic offers people the opportunity to heal the inner landscape of the human soul, says Anosh Irani, a Vancouver-based author. Irani addresses the …

Learning how to co-exist - Anti-Asian prejudice is theme of UBC’s national forum
June 7 2021 Cover StoryPhoto courtesy of UBC
“I was about ten years old, and I looked at myself in the mirror in my parent’s bedroom, questioning: Why was I born Chinese? I remember feeling alone and ugly because …

New endings to old paradigms - Queer art as resistance against colonial-patriarchal ideas of success
May 24 2021 ArtQueer Filipino photographer Rydel Cerezo invites audiences to fail. He sees failure as a means to open new possibilities for queer and marginalized bodies to thrive. His exhibition at the Burrard …

Cultivating social trust at the intersection of race and sexuality
May 10 2021 Local“Art and love are powerful mechanisms that impact change,’’ says Jen Sungshine, co-creative director and founder of Love Intersections.
Sungshine, a queer Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist…

Someone Like Me- The challenges of queer solidarity in Vancouver
April 26 2021 CultureIn the documentary Someone Like Me, when a queer group of strangers unite to support a gay Ugandan man seeking
asylum in Canada, unexpected challenges lead them down an emotional road together in …

Mirrors, activists, teachers, truth-tellers: traces of who the poet is
March 22 2021 Cover Story Photo courtesy of Thought Catalog
the doctor says, brain tumor
and my mother does not answer
I watch my ghost leave her …

KDocsFF - A new form of life: can Artificial Intelligence become a tool for surveillance capitalism?
March 8 2021 Cover Story“We are setting the stage for something that transcends us. A new form of life is emerging. Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping the world. It’s going to be everywhere all the time. …

Urban resilience: the idea of a city for its people
February 22 2021 Local“The pandemic has rendered useless many of the urban resilience plans that have been made over the past decade,” says Simon Fraser University (SFU) professor Meg Holden (PhD), director of the …

Supremacy ideology and the refusal to change
January 25 2021 Cover StoryCofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, Sarah Schulman argues that when people are raised or …

Everything Leaks - The myth of photography and its presence in contemporary life
December 7 2020 Art Contemporary culture has become dematerialized and digitized. | Photo courtesy of Polygon Gallery
The Polygon Gallery opens a…