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The University of Saskatchewan is pleased to announce Alex Turgeon as the Structurist Creative Research Fellow (SCRF) for 2025–26. As SCRF, Turgeon will develop three distinct pillars of the overall project: an exhibition curated from the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection, a series of new artistic works produced in tandem and to be included as response to works in the collection, and a public program designed as an outward facing symposium on themes explored within the exhibition.
About the project
In his 1975 manifesto, The New Art of Making Books, conceptual artist Ulises Carrión declared that “a book is a sequence of spaces.” Through his work, Carrión developed both physical and conceptual structures for the book—from artistic methods of distribution to establishing the first artist-run bookstore, Other Books and So (1975–79). His methodology framed printed matter as a “space-time sequence,” interpreting bookworks as spatial experiences. Through this logic, artistic publishing constructs physical worlds and alternative realities. As part of the Structurist Creative Research Fellowship, interwoven themes of queer architectural theory, concrete poetry, and sculptural installation will be positioned to engage with the utopian impulse rooted in the history of independent publishing through the lens of The Structurist journal (1960–2020). This fellowship will cultivate a speculative—and tangible—form of queer utopian strategy for world building informed by practices of radical publishing, framed to critically interpret late-capitalist ideologies that define built spaces and their inhabitants.
About the fellow
Alex Turgeon is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the structural relationships between poetry and architecture, interpreting how together these fields work to inform the queer subject as built environment. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MFA from Rutgers University. He was a 2022–23 Junge Akademie Fellow at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin and has participated as an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2011), Rupert (2015), Fondazione Antonio Ratti (2017), Autodesk Technology Center (2019) and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2024–25). His work has been presented in part at the Tate (Liverpool); KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the Akademie der Künste (Berlin); Kunsthalle Zürich; Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius); and Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), as well as part of “Poetry as Practice,” an online exhibition hosted by Rhizome and the New Museum (New York).
About the Structurist Creative Research Fellowship
The Structurist Creative Research Fellowship (SCRF) was established to carry forward the critical intentions of The Structurist: an international, interdisciplinary journal founded in 1960 by Eli Bornstein that addresses art, architecture, ecology, culture, and communication. From its inaugural issue, the journal became increasingly concerned with the relationship between art and ecology, and the ways in which creative practices are required and necessary in preserving and protecting our threatened ecospheres. The SCRF supports work that contributes to this discursive field in active and contemporary ways and works to thicken, rather than mythologize, the journal’s prevailing ethos. The SCRF is available to individuals pursuing research and creative work engaged in the thematics and intersections brought forward in The Structurist. The urgency of these connections and the potential of investigation therein is heightened in this historical moment of climate death, migrant crises, and divisive global policies.
For more information on The Structurist and the SCRF, visit here.
