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“My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.” ~ Rumi

CURRENT EXHIBITION

Soheila Esfahani, Heidi McKenzie, Zinnia Naqvi

Across Latitudes examines the intricate realities of moving between cultures and across generations in the process of forging identities and locating our place in the world. The distinct art practices of Soheila Esfahani, Heidi McKenzie, and Zinnia Naqvi all draw from experiences of diaspora to explore the complex terrain of cultural migration and commodification. Emphasizing the artifice of national icons and tourist souvenirs, their work considers the uncomfortable impact of such commodities on the process of shaping personal identity, and aims to unravel the stereotypes they perpetuate. By holding these objects up for examination, and by integrating a diverse range of culturally significant insertions of personal identity, such as traditional motifs, family and archival photographs, and mementos from childhood, these three artists engage in creative acts of revisiting, reworking, and reclaiming to offer new interpretations and meanings. The artists in Across Latitudes look to their personal paths of migration—with roots in Iran, the Caribbean, and Pakistan—to counter the limitations of myth-making and to foreground the multi-dimensionality of intercultural experience.

—Shannon Anderson, Curator

CURATORIAL PROJECT

In Search of a Loss of Self: The Language of Alterity

curated by Soheila Esfahani and Mélika Hashemi

September 20 to December 7, 2024

McIntosh Gallery, Western University, London, Ontario

Expanding on Edward Said’s original thesis in Orientalism (1978), which focused primarily on the colonial [re]imagining of the East, In Search of a Loss of Self: The Language of Alterity is a journey of self-discovery. First and second-generation Muslim-Canadian artists and scholars, Soheila Esfahani and Melika Hashemi perform a survey of the McIntosh Gallery Permanent Collection, yet fail to see themselves reflected in collected works or under database search keywords. Consequently, they argue that Islamic art and artists fall into the cracks of collection acquisition practices.

As Legacy Russell writes in her manifesto, Glitch Feminism (2020), “In the moments of glitch, a break occurs in the expected flow, and in this break, it is possible to create an intervention, to slip new codes into the system and explore freely in the cracks”. In search of a loss of self, the co-curators realised ‘loss’ didn’t really mean they were at a loss, and not all ‘gaps’ meant they fell through the cracks–rather, they had more space to explore freely. This process allows Esfahani and Hashemi to explore the possibilities of reconstructions, creating new meanings and interpretations through a poetic gesture–or code– that calls upon the collective to confront erasure and condemnation.

Esfahani and Hashemi employ the punk methodology of ‘bricolage’ to look forwards and backwards, bringing together seemingly disparate ideas into a Post-Orientalist re-storying of works from the McIntosh Gallery Permanent Collection. Punk methodology in curation is examined in detail by global art curator, Sara Raza, in her book Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion (2022), described as the use of tropes to collapse transcultural and intergenerational ideas that at times exist behind barriers. This exhibition includes interventions and collaborations using archival and historical materials, and artist-driven accounts and responses, to create bricolages relating to language, and art that revolves around language, especially relating to migratory and grief aesthetics.

“My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.” ~ Rumi

CURRENT EXHIBITION

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