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← Return to Portable Culture
← Return to Portable Culture
Are We T[here] Yet?
solo exhibition
curated by Niku Koochak
July 17- September 21
opening reception: Thursday July 17th, 5-9 pm; Artist talk: 8:00-8:30 pm
Art Windsor-Essex
Windsor, ON
ARE WE T[HERE] YET? asks whether stories can ever truly be finished, or if they are always in a process of retelling, reinventing, and reinterpretation. This exhibition doesn’t ask the viewer to identify what is “real,” but instead invites reflection: How does meaning form? Is it in the object? The touch? The story? Or simply the gaze?
Imagine a love story told a hundred years ago, in a land far from here, within a culture unfamiliar to your own. That story inspires the creation of a handmade bowl, a carved ornament, a painted plate, or perhaps a ceramic bird. Over time, the story fades, but the object remains. Or maybe just part of the lone bird survives the shard with a painted flower.
That fragment travels. It is copied, collected, and reimagined. It enters new hands and new places, adopted by other cultures who reinterpret its form for beauty, for curiosity, or for commerce. Its meaning drifts. Eventually, its origin may become unclear or even forgotten. We see this in blue-and-white ceramics replicated across centuries, or floral motifs that pass between continents, shifting in meaning as they move.
Soheila Esfahani’s work explores this transformation. Being there and here. ARE WE T[HERE] YET? brings together ceramic birds, painted plates, and sculptural elements some handmade, others factory-produced or collected over time. These objects occupy a space between authenticity and adaptation, challenging our impulse to trace things back to a singular, fixed origin.
As an Iranian Canadian artist based in Waterloo, Ontario, Esfahani investigates how cultural forms change through translation, migration, and reproduction. Her practice draws on both handmade and mass-produced objects, placing them in conversation to examine how meaning is shaped and reshaped.
Esfahani’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), and the Canadian Museum of Immigration (Halifax), and is held in collections such as the Canada Council Art Bank. She currently teaches at Western University and is a member of Toronto’s Red Head Gallery.
Recent Acquisitions from the McIntosh Gallery Collection: Angela Grauerholz, Meryl McMaster, and Soheila Esfahani
April 5- July 11, 2025
Curated by Rachel Deiterding
McIntosh Gallery
London, ON
Each artwork in the McIntosh Gallery collection has individual, yet intersecting histories. It is these moments of intersection, or patterns of collecting, that tell the Gallery’s story.
Holding Patterns: the short view marks the beginning of a comprehensive inquiry into the McIntosh Gallery collection to makes sense of how more than 4,000 artworks have come together to create this valuable resource. Considering a selection of artworks collected since 2020, the short view looks to the recent past. This reflection emphasizes some of the conversations that have been entangled with the collection over the past several years and poses critical questions about what it means to collect.
Soheila Esfahani, Meryl McMaster, and Angela Grauerholz are all concerned with collecting, whether this is through the personal ephemera that we use to document and define our sense of self; efforts to objectively order, categorize, and control the natural world; or institutional commitments to preserve cultural memory that begrudgingly remain susceptible to the passing of time. As McIntosh Gallery undertakes a detailed assessment of the collection, the recent past provides critical tools to inform the future. Each artwork has much to teach us about inclinations to collect across contexts and inspires new approaches to collecting. The Reference Table, a resource hub and study space, invites visitors to reflect on the complicated questions of collections alongside the gallery. Together, these materials frame the conversation as we consider how we might approach collecting differently moving into the future.
Becoming Otherwise
Soheila Esfahani, Jessica Karuhanga, Behnaz Fatemi, Imogen Clendinning, Xi Jin, and Racquel Rowe
June 26 – July 10, 2025
Curated by Yijing Li
artLAB Gallery, Western University
Panel Discussion: Thursday, June 26 from 4:30-5:30pm
Reception: Thursday, June 26 from 5:30pm-7pm
How do we unbecome what the world has asked of us?
Becoming Otherwise is not a destination but a process—a call to question what has been imposed, and to imagine new ways of being. Becoming Otherwise brings together the voices of six artists—Soheila Esfahani, Jessica Karuhanga, Imogen Clendinning, Behnaz Fatemi, Xi Jin, and Racquel Rowe—whose works trace ruptures and gestures of resistance woven through the fabric of the everyday. Through acts of disruption, reclamation, and poetic reconfiguration, these artists reimagine identity amidst ongoing legacies of displacement and erasure. Their practices transform personal and collective memory into sites of resistance and renewal, where identity is made, remade, and continuously unfolding.
We are not what they named us
Not in the borders they drew without our voice
We hold our root in the ruin
To unbecome the stories told for us
To gather fragments not as broken
But as constellation
To return
Not to the given
But to the long-forbidden
To our breath
Steady and sovereign
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