Joële Walinga is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker. She studied Intermedia at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Concordia University, and works conceptually across disciplines including performance, sculpture, scent, and video art, with an emphasis on film. Her work explores fantasy, fear, memory and its incongruities, subjective truth and the impossibility of Truth, grief and where it shelters within us. She positions conceptual frameworks against public participation, with an interest in what can be revealed when a project is opened up to chance rather than shielded from it. Her films manipulate time and space, fiction and reality to use film as a tool for creating otherwise impossible moments of fantasy, kindness, reconciliation, and/or correction.
Walinga was one of the 2019 artists in residence at the John and Maggie Mitchell Art Gallery in Edmonton, Canada with her fantastical community collaborative grief project Evictions, and is an alumna of Berlinale Talents 2021, and the 2022 Zurich Film Festival Academy. Her work has been shown at SXSW, the Art Gallery of Ontario, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, DOXA, RIDM, MDFF Selects, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, The Khyber Centre for the Arts, Narwhal Contemporary, TRUCK Contemporary Art, the John and Maggie Mitchell Art Gallery, and MUBI among others.
She is the co-founder of the free Toronto filmmaking gear program Everyone’s Camera, and the artist residency CASA PIP, offering month-long, free-of-charge stays for film workers in all fields to use the space without guidance, rules, or deliverables, in whatever way they see fit for their particular practice and its needs.