Creatives at Work Artist Residency | Niku Koochak
We’re thrilled to welcome Niku Koochak as the first Artist-in-Residence in our Creatives at Work program. Niku will spend six weeks at The City Market during June and July, exploring new work inspired by the space and its community. If you’re hoping to catch Niku in action, you can often find her at her market stall on weekends between 10am and 3pm. A special Open Studio Day will be held on Saturday, July 19, from 11 AM to 3 PM, with an Artist Talk at 3 PM, offering a deeper look at her practice and how the residency has shaped her work.
The residency will conclude with an exhibition at ArtSpeak Gallery, on display July 28 – August 3. A public workshop is also in development that will take place during this week!
This page will be updated regularly as Niku’s experience unfolds, so check back for progress photos, reflections, and event announcements!
ABOUT
Niku Koochak
Niku Koochak is a multidisciplinary Iranian artist and emerging curator based in Windsor, Ontario. She holds a background in architecture from the University of Tehran and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. Her practice explores how identity is shaped by navigating different social environments through migration, and by confronting shifting norms as both a citizen and an outsider.
Working across abstract painting, installation, and performative drawing, Koochak uses unconventional tools elastic bands, slingshots, and custom-built drawing devices to explore the tension between control and surrender, language and abstraction. Her work reflects the duality of living across systems: where the body is grounded in one place, but the mind stretches elsewhere.
Rooted in lived experience, her visual language speaks to fragmented memory, internal conflict, and the untranslatability of personal and collective histories. Koochak has exhibited in both Iran and Canada and is currently the 2024–2025 TD Curatorial Fellow at Art Windsor-Essex.
@nikukoochak on instagram
The City Market
The City Market: Windsor’s newest addition is focused on sustaining local business and bringing the community together.
Providing a place for Farm Vendors, Prepared Food Vendors, Craft Vendors and Service Providers of all type to come together in a unique atmosphere and enjoy the community, people and the things that our local Windsor/Essex region has to offer.
1030 Walker Rd, Windsor, ON
PROCESS
EXHIBITON
Rent This Space: Installation Aisle
July 28 – August 3rd – ArtSpeak Gallery
As part of the Creatives at Work, six weeks of residency organized by the Arts Council Windsor & Region in partnership with the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Centre and supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation a sculptural installation was developed in response to The City Market.
The work emerged from weeks of observation, mapping, and navigating the market’s layered environment. Constructed with PVC pipes, grid systems, surface textures, and cultural fragments, the installation abstracted the market’s spatial density, visual noise, and playful signage into a maze-like composition. It functioned as a perceptual echo of the market’s chaotic harmony, inviting viewers to engage from a distance.
CBC Radio interviewed Niku Koochak and ACWR’s Executive Director, Alejandro Tamayo, about the Creatives at Work Artist Residency Program. The interview is available for listening on cbc.ca.
WORKSHOP
