Jude Abu Zaineh, Soheila Esfahani, Xiaojing Yan: The Art of Living

Curator: Catherine Bédard

Unknown to each other, from distant countries, these three artists and their work are coming together for the first time. What they have in common is the strange feeling of living in an in-between place, not quite rooted, suspended between two worlds, attached to the symbols of belonging to their cultures of origin, yet diverting them.

Food, desire, religion and protection are all issues in their art, as are technology, globalization and consumer society.

Both Eastern and Western, these women came to Canada from China, Palestine and Iran, and forge ties that transform, distort and augment strong symbolic images: a staircase, a bridge, a word, a poem, decorative motifs, myths and legends. They give another dimension to the notion of cultural identity by presenting the viewer with hybrid and industrialized objects that are denatured, far from any idealization of the elsewhere and the past. A blood-red filamentary goddess, decorative motifs teeming with biological life, commercial reproductions of a traditional bird from 3D prints and other works that allow symbols to freely migrate, constitute a powerful, intimate reflection on an art of displacement and diaspora.

The works exhibited are meant to be inclusive of all viewers: they display their lack of solemnity, they reject noble materials and “good taste,” and instead opt for simple identifiers (Arabic calligraphy, traditional Middle Eastern dishes, ceramic soup spoons from Asian restaurants), they make themselves literally light and sensitive to the passage of time – even to the time of the decomposition of a meal’s remains. The Art of Living proposes, through the bringing together of three individual journeys that led these women to settle in Canada, a sensitive and original approach to the immigrant experience, as well as to overcoming it through gestures of transgression affecting the symbols of national cultures.