Disrupting Collections explores how artists and cultural practitioners challenge the ways museums collect, preserve, and present art and cultural knowledge. Their work engages with questions of cultural sovereignty, ancestral knowledge, and the authority to determine how cultural materials are interpreted and shared. The panel considers how artistic practices can reshape conventional understandings of collecting and create alternative ways of sustaining and circulating knowledge. The discussion examines how cultural expression moves beyond institutional categories, connecting living communities, embodied experience, and contemporary technologies. The conversation considers how artists can influence the future of collections and the ways museums engage with cultural knowledge, creative practice, and the communities from which their collections emerge.

Meet the panelists:

Barry Ace is a multidisciplinary Ottawa-based artist and citizen of M’Chigeeng First Nation. His work bridges Anishinaabeg aesthetics with digital technologies and contemporary communication. Widely exhibited and collected, he received the 2015 KM Hunter Visual Artist Award and the 2025 King Charles III Coronation Medal.

Moe Laga is a South Auckland performance artist whose practice spans movement, activation, stage and screen, and collaborative visual art shown in Australia and at China’s Pingyao International Photography Festival. A graduate of the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts and MIT, she has been part of FAFSWAG since 2012 and is Mother of the house of COVEN.

Léuli Eshrāghi belongs to the Sāmoan clans Seumanutafa and Tautua and the Persian diaspora, and lives and works in Montréal. Their practice prioritizes Indigenous, Black, and Asian sensual and spoken languages alongside artistic, ceremonial, and political practices, with major works presented at Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and QAGOMA, among others. Eshrāghi is inaugural Curator of Indigenous Practices at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and serves on several Indigenous arts advisory bodies, including the 2026 Toronto Biennial’s national curatorial advisory.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs is an Iñupiaq and Athabascan mixed-media artist from Alaska whose family hails from Utqiaġvik and Nulato. Her painting, sculpture, and curatorial work explore Indigenous identity, history, and materiality, blending customary and synthetic materials. A United States Artists and Joan Mitchell Fellow, she lives and works in Anchorage.

Pati Tyrell is a Samoan interdisciplinary artist with a strong focus on performance. They use lens-based media to create visual material centred around ideas of urban Pacific queer identity. They have shown work at Museum of Contemporary Arts Australia, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Centre Pompidou Paris, and was a 2018 Walters Prize nominee. Tyrell is a co-founder of the queer Pasifika arts collective FAFSWAG, who in 2020 received an Arts Foundation Laureate, and in 2022 showed at the documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany.

Elyssia Wilson-Heti is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and FAFSWAG member of mixed Niuean and European heritage. She produces for FAFSWAG Arts Collective and was recently appointed creative director of Auckland Pride Festival. Her collaborative, intersectional practice spans performance, production, and advocacy.