The Art of Living: On Immigration, Community and the Migration of Symbols
Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris
May 13th, 2022 - October 21st, 2022
Jude Abu Zaineh, Soheila Esfahani, Xiaojing Yan – curated by Catherine Bedard
Unknown to each other, from distant countries, the artists Xiaojing Yan, Jude Abu Zaineh et Soheila Esfahani and their work are coming together for the first time. What they have in common is the ever-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 who came to Canada from China, Palestine and Iran 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.