About

Soheila K. Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran, and moved to Canada in 1992. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario. Currently, Soheila is a participant in a research/creation group entitledImmersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds: Engaging Water as Culture and Resource through Contemporary Art funded by Research/Creation Grant in Fine Arts through Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada. Soheila has received numerous awards and grants and her work is represented in public and private collections including the Canada Council’s Art Bank…read more

detail of painting by Soheila Esfahani

CURATORIAL PROJECT

Nagotiating Culture

curated by Soheila Esfahani

Michael ManChoi Chow, Andrea Filiatrault, Elizabeth Forrest, Wen Li (also Assistant Curator), Nancy Peng, Barry Smylie

October 31- November 10, 2024
Flex Space @ 44 Gaukel St, Kitchener, Ontario

In a multicultural society such as Canada, many people live in-between cultures and inevitably participate in cultural translation. Within the framework of cultural theory, the act of translation is the negotiation arising from encounters of various social groups with different cultural traditions. Furthermore, cultural translation destabilizes the notion of an originary culture and opens up the space of negotiation called the third space.* This curatorial project asks artists to reflect on how they define culture and what it means to live in the third space and negotiate cultural variance. If artists are cultural producers, how do they represent culture in their work? What are some of the ways we connect to other cultures and possibly live in liminal or in-between spaces?

* The terms cultural translation and the third space are coined by Homi K. Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture.

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.

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