Partners in Art is pleased to support the inaugural residencies for SITE Toronto. The two artists in residence were Yantong Li and Olukemi Lijadu.
SITE Toronto is a new kind of institution for contemporary art: experimental, interdisciplinary, and continually in formation. Developed in response to concrete gaps in Toronto’s arts ecosystem, SITE supports artists and cultural practitioners through residencies, mentorships, publications, public programs, and collaborative forms of research and exchange.
About Olukemi Lijadu:
Based between London, UK, and Lagos, Nigeria, Olukemi Lijadu’s research-based practice explores diasporic sound, inheritance, and the complexity of affect as it travels across geographies. Working across performance, moving image, and the sonic, she examines how musical forms function as vessels of memory—carrying histories of migration, rupture, and return. Her recent work traces the legacy of West African music within electronic music cultures, investigating looping not simply as a formal device, but as a structure of collective memory and (dis)connection—where repetition becomes both continuity and fracture.
Lijadu’s research moves across sites central to Black cultural production—from Chicago music festivals to the beaches of Lagos and the layered African-Caribbean histories of Bristol—mapping how sound operates as both archive and infrastructure. During her time in Toronto, Lijadu extends this inquiry into the city’s diasporic sonic landscapes, asking how local histories of migration and Black cultural formation reverberate within contemporary electronic and performance cultures.
About Yantong Li:
Yantong Li is a researcher, curator and artist of ethnic Bai lineage based in Toronto, Canada. He is a Master of Visual Studies (curatorial) graduate at the University of Toronto. Li works at the intersection of transregional infrastructure, geopolitics, and
regional folklore in the Southeast Asian massif. Li’s current work engages with indigenous cosmologies in Chinese borderlands and the concurrent dispersion of myths and languages across borders and oceans.
Li often works collaboratively. His past curatorial and artistic works have been shown internationally, include the Curatorial Awards at Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival, Xiamen, China (2022); Durian-Durian: the First Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial, Guangzhou, China (2023); Trinity Square Videos, Canada (2023); The New Gallery, Canada (2024); Jackman Humanities Institute (2024); Goethe Institute Beijing, China (2025); Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto (2025).
