Chantal Hassard

Chantal Hassard is an artist and filmmaker interrogating the relationship between an artwork, the artist and its viewer which she views in parallel with law, policy and the body politic and often makes participatory paintings that embody this relationship.

She graduated from the University of Toronto in Political Science and Visual Studies and is currently wrapping up a MA degree in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the cultural production of autonomous space in Amsterdam.

Her current body of work 'A(d)Just (the) City' performs the experimental role of artistic research by delivering a translation and analysis of the collective cultural production carried out by a decentralised assemblage of individual artists and activists working within the squatting scene and other autonomous spaces around Amsterdam. The ongoing self-documentation through visual, musical, poetic and other forms of cultural production emerging from autonomous cultural space is interpreted as part of a collaborative activistic and artistic urban process which has struggled to produce alternative/autonomous/free spaces as a force of resistance against capitalist logic and gentrification of Amsterdam as a hyper touristic city.