Esfahani’s art practice navigates the terrains of cultural translation and explores the processes involved in cultural transfer and transformation. Her installations focus on the translation in its etymological meaning as the process of ‘carrying across’ or ‘bringing across’ and Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the third space as a site for cultural translation. Her recent work questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture by re-contextualizing culturally specific ornamentation and various collected souvenir type objects. She navigates the terrains of cultural translation by exploring ornamentation as a form of “portable culture” that can be carried across cultures and nations. Her recent practice aims to destabilize the origin of culture and reconstruct Homi Bhabha’s “the third space of in-betweeness”: a site of cultural translation, where locations of cultures are negotiated and new narratives are adapted and hybridized. In this body of work, Esfahani simultaneously emphasizes and disrupts familiar collected objects such as blue and white china in order to dissolve traditional boundaries between cultures.
