The five artists will be featured in the upcoming Lind Biennial in December

FEB. 17, 2026 (VANCOUVER, CANADA) — The Polygon Gallery is pleased to announce the finalists of the 2026 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize: Bagua Artist Association, Alejandro A. Barbosa, Dana Qaddah, Pegah Tabassinejad, and Ximena Velázquez. The artists will be featured in the upcoming Lind Biennial, on view at the gallery from Dec. 4, 2026–Feb. 7, 2027, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony on Jan. 21, 2027.

“We are thrilled to present new works by this year’s finalists — a cohort of artists and one artist collective who are re-defining the boundaries of lens-based art across the province,” says Reid Shier, director of The Polygon. “Each artist in The Lind Biennial brings a vital perspective, with works that offer provocative standpoints in an increasingly fragmented world.”

The 2026 finalists were selected from a longlist of more than 60 nominees by a panel of esteemed international jurors: critically acclaimed artist Stan Douglas; Candice Hopkins, executive director of Forge Project in Taghkanic, New York; and Susanne Pfeffer, director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany.

The Lind Prize was established in 2015 with a donation from Rogers Communications in honour of Phil Lind’s 40-year commitment to the communications industry. Lind was a giant in the arts and education community for his many philanthropic endeavours, as well as an avid art collector with a particular love for contemporary photography and BC artists. In 2023, an endowment from the Lind Family ensured the future of the prize, which is now awarded biannually to an emerging BC-based artist working across the mediums of film, photography, or video. Artists are nominated by staff and faculty from established arts institutions, organizations, and post-secondary programs from across the province. The award is juried by an international panel of artists and curators.

Jed Lind, Phil’s son, says: “As a family, we are proud to be able to uphold my father’s legacy as a patron of the arts. The Lind Biennial was created to support bold, ambitious artists at a pivotal moment in their careers. We are excited to see this year’s finalists leave their mark as they showcase their creativity and innovation in lens-based practices.”

Previous Lind Prize winners are: Casey Wei (2025), Simranpreet Anand (2023), Charlotte Zhang (2021), Laura Gildner (2020), Jessica Johnson (2019), Christopher Lacroix (2018), Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (2017), and Vilhelm Sundin (2016).

For more information, visit https://thepolygon.ca/exhibition/the-lind-biennial-2026

About the artists

Bagua Artist Association is a two-person artist collective founded in 2018, consisting of Katharine Meng-Yuan Yi (b. 1991, Beijing) and Sean Cao (b. 1992, Tianjin). Yi holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia, and Cao holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Rooted in migration and deeply embedded in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the collective’s multidisciplinary practice integrates lens-based approaches within a research-driven and socially engaged framework. Their name, Bagua 八卦 – a double entendre that invokes both the ancestral cosmological trigrams of Chinese divination and modern slang for gossip – encapsulates their interest in cultural traditions and expressions, folk art, pop media, social phenomena, and the everyday.

Alejandro A. Barbosa (b. 1986, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a queer Latinx visual artist, educator and curator whose practice focuses on lens-based media and investigates the flaws of representation, queer lived experience, and the politics of looking. They hold an MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in Studio Arts (Photography) from Concordia University. They are a non-regular faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia.

Dana Qaddah (b. 1996, Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and organiser whose work centres themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and the condition of being abstracted from the sense of self and place. Qaddah is currently pursuing an MFA at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (New York) and holds a BFA from Emily Carr University (Vancouver). Recent exhibitions include Never One Thing Alone at Gallery TPW (Toronto) and Another Green World at the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver).

Pegah Tabassinejad (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Tabassinejad’s practice primarily revolves around the construction of digital and live performances, film, and video installations. Her practice acts as an interrogation of themes that include the impact of digital and surveillance culture on identity, virtual and physical presences and absences, and the forces that structure and shape the movement and perception of people and their bodies in private and public space. Tabassinejad holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Stage Direction from the Tehran University of Art. She also studied Visual Art at Azad University in Tehran.

Ximena Velázquez (b. 1989, Villahermosa, Mexico) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the body, image, sound, and textiles to explore identity, desire, and memory from a queer perspective that moves across geographic territories. Velázquez has presented her work in independent cultural spaces and galleries across Latin America, Europe, and Canada, including The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City; and Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond. Her pieces have also been part of screenings in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Chile, and Mexico. Additionally, she produces events and workshops as La PosmoBaby that support Latin American and dissident artistic communities.

Curated by Elliott Ramsey

Endowed by The Lind Family in memory of Philip B. Lind

 

About The Polygon Gallery
Grounded in photography, The Polygon Gallery creates space to challenge how we see the world. The Gallery moved into its Governor General’s Medal-winning building in 2017 after operating as Presentation House Gallery for 40 years. The organization has presented more than 300 exhibitions and earned a reputation as one of the country’s most adventurous public art institutions. Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO Financial Group.

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