Curated by Shannon Anderson
July 20 to September 29, 2024
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 markers 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 diasporic roots in Iran, the Caribbean, and Pakistan to counter the limitations of myth-making and to foreground the multi-dimensionality of intercultural experience.
Soheila Esfahani’s work focuses on the translation and movement of cultural influences. As an artist who grew up in Tehran, Iran, and has spent the last thirty years living in Canada, Esfahani is drawn to the space between these two cultures and how they are defined through cultural objects, symbols, and ornamentation. In the works presented in Across Latitudes, she adopts stereotypical objects representing “Canadiana,” and interweaves them with Iranian cultural patterning and motifs. Deer, Moose, and Ducks, for example, adopt various wooden objects sourced from thrift and antique stores of typical “Canadian” animal depictions, which the artist overlays with elaborate Islamic ornamentation. Here: Moose and There: Rabbit are based on Processional standards, traditionally used in Shia commemorations. Esfahani’s contemporary interpretation replaces the inclusion of fantastical creatures with typical Canadian animals the ubiquitous rabbit, and the iconic moose and incorporates an arabesque design derived from the city of Isfahan, where the artist’s ancestors are from. These hybridized works express the desire to claim a culture despite feeling disconnected from it, emphasizing the ongoing, multilayered, and intricate process of defining identity. Soheila Esfahani, Here: Moose, There: Rabbit, 2022; laser-cut aluminum
The notion of the “third space,” which arises from the work of post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha, is a central influence for Esfahani. The third space is connected to a negotiated sense of identity that arises from the collision of different cultures, creating a state of being in-between. This state is not static but rather continually changes and evolves. It’s a perspective that rests uneasily against the concept of the tourist souvenir, which attempts to distill cultural identity into an object steeped in stereotypes. The collection of bright blue objects that comprise Esfahani’s Been T[Here] series are resin replicas of tourist paraphernalia created through 3D printing. Working from open-source object files, the artist deliberately introduced corruptions to cause permutations and errors in the printing process. The resulting sculptures which range from faithful reproductions to curious, sometimes unrecognizable objects are playful, literal representations of collapsing cultural stereotypes.
A ceramic artist, Heidi McKenzie creates work informed by her mixed-race IndoTrinidadian / Irish-American heritage. She incorporates photography, digital media, and archival materials to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration, and colonization. Works such as House of Cards, House Work, and Building Blocks contain images of both her maternal and paternal ancestors, interweaving these histories “We are the sum of who we came from,” McKenzie notes. Her parents married in the 1950s, at a time when interracial marriages were extremely uncommon or even illegal in some American states, and these ceramic sculptures emphasize the fragility of these relationships as well as McKenzie’s careful handling of her ancestors’ histories.
A number of McKenzie’s works in this exhibition shed light on the socio-political realities of her IndoCaribbean ancestors, particularly women. Looking Back and Illuminated incorporate archival “coolie belle” portraits images taken by male colonial photographers of Indo-Caribbean women who were indentured labourers and portrayed as exoticized commodities for Western tourists at the turn of the last century. Division underscores the gap between the lived experiences of the workers and the plantation owners. These archival photographs, which were originally shot on glass plates and hand-processed, then produced as postcards, are transferred to ceramic tile by the artist in gestures of reclamation and decolonization. As seen in the images, many of these women wore their earnings on their body in the form of jewellery. In Coinage, McKenzie replicates the coins the women wore around their necks in ceramic at a dramatically enlarged scale, metaphorically emphasizing the value of these matrilineal ancestors.
McKenzie brings this history into the present in Holding Ancestry, which features the descendants of these “coolie belles” in a series of illuminated portraits of women holding images of their ancestors. Their stories are shared through online interviews (accessible through an augmented reality app) that emphasize the unique nature of each person’s explorations of their matrilineal line By weaving these portraits and family stories into her work, McKenzie generates a rich, layered history of women across generations.
Zinnia Naqvi’s practice considers issues of colonialism, cultural translation, social class, and citizenship through a lens-based practice. Drawing from archival and restaged images, she examines the complex social dynamics that unfold in front of the camera. In her Yours to Discover series, Naqvi incorporates photographs from her personal archives, all taken during the late 1980s when her family toured Canada with the prospect of emigrating from Pakistan. The series title references the slogan of a popular Ontario advertising campaign that emerged in the 1980s, and the images capture her family visiting popular tourist sites around the province, such as the CN Tower, Niagara Falls, and Cullen Gardens and Miniature Village. Naqvi places these photographs within compositions that include a disparate arrangement of toys, books, and other paraphernalia. These objects are carefully staged (not unlike the tourist experience) and function like a set of clues. While playful and colourful, they also display stark visual evidence of the stereotypes that pervade popular culture, for example the insertion of Disney titles like Aladdin and Pocahantas, which play to problematic characterizations of Middle Eastern and Indigenous cultures. Naqvi also references the dialogue around national identity through the insertion of book titles like Cultivating Canada, and The New Pakistani Middle Class. These visual collages serve to weave the artist’s personal history into larger questions around placemaking and belonging.
Traces of Naqvi’s own body also appear in these images, as a way of underscoring the constructed nature of identity. In both A Border Passage and Continuous Journey, we see her hand holding up a photograph against the backdrop of the same image, doubling the scene in a way that disjoints our perspective And in Another Desi with a camera, which features a series of photographs taken at Niagara Falls, the artist also restages the scenes, assuming the role of an unknown woman depicted in the original photographs. In the text below, one column imagines the thoughts of the woman that Naqvi impersonates, and the other describes her own experience of observing, “I couldn’t help but notice her,” she says. “I’ve been in her situation before.”
All three artists in this exhibition inscribe, in different ways, their experiences of belonging amid the construct of what it means to be Canadian. They highlight the artifice of sites and objects that are intended to represent national identity the images in postcards, the gift shop trinkets and how they simplify and misrepresent the realities of lived experience. The works in Across Latitudes emphasize the ways in which identities are shaped by the influence of our family histories and personal cultural connections, as uniquely individual and continuous journeys
Shannon Anderson, AGM Senior Curator
Soheila Esfahani currently lives in Waterloo, Ontario. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the 2016 Waterloo Region Arts Awards (Visual Arts category). She has exhibited her work across Canada, with recent exhibitions at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, the University of Waterloo Art Gallery; the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant, Brantford; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; and Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound. She received her MFA from the University of Western Ontario and her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. Esfahani is an Assistant Professor at Western University and a member of Red Head Gallery in Toronto.
Heidi McKenzie has exhibited her work across Canada and internationally, in the United States, Europe, and Scandinavia. Among her recent solo exhibition is Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto in 2023. The recipient of numerous grants, she has participated in residencies in Denmark, Ireland, Hungary, Australia, China, and Indonesia. McKenzie was a finalist for the Shantz Award, Canada’s national emerging ceramics award in 2022, and she was inducted into the International Academy of Ceramics that same year. She curated the exhibition Decolonizing Clay at the Australian Ceramics Triennale in 2019, and recently participated in the Indian Ceramics Triennale in Delhi, India. McKenzie completed her MFA at OCADU and is currently based in Toronto.
Zinnia Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally, with exhibitions in New York, Iceland, Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates. She is a 2022 Fall Flaherty/Colgate Filmmaker in Residence and recipient of the 2019 New Generation Photography Award organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Naqvi is a member of EMILIAAMALIA Working Group, an intergenerational feminist collective. She received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montreal. Currently based in Toronto, she is a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
The Art Gallery of Mississauga gratefully acknowledge the support and generosity of our funders for this exhibition: the City of Mississauga, the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, TD Bank Group, Rama Gaming House and Charitable Gaming Community Good.
Land Acknowledgement
The Art Gallery of Mississauga acknowledges and gives thanks to the land on which we have the privilege of operating on. This land is the present day territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation and the traditional homeland of the Wendat, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations. We are thankful to the many First Nations, Inuit, Métis and global Indigenous peoples who call this region home.
The AGM firmly believes that the arts have an important role to play in addressing the critical issues of our time, particularly to breaking down social barriers and forging connections. Recommendation 83 of The Truth and Reconciliation Report highlights the importance of the arts in conversations for the future of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations. The AGM is committed to recognizing and incorporating diverse Indigenous perspectives within engagement and exhibition programming, by engaging with Indigenous artists and cultural producers as an indication of our commitment to and actions in support of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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