HOME(LAND) examines how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with the fluid and shifting characteristics of identity, belonging, and home across and between races, regions, cultures and nations.

Through a series of three exhibitions, HOME(LAND) investigates the complex issues surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on global migration, site, and identity. Artists from diverse backgrounds whose practice and work are infused by unique intersectional complexities, examine questions on concepts such as kinship, ancestry, memory, and racialization.

HOME(LAND)’ s projects and programming invites the possibility of opening diasporic discourses for perspectives of reconciliation. Holding space where artists from diverse backgrounds and indigenous peoples are able to share their experiences and commonalities in relationship to the land, as it encompasses a deep sense of community, spirituality, and identity for both.

Where

Cloverdale Common Cultural Hub at Cloverdale Mall

250 The East Mall, Toronto, ON M9B 3Y83.

Hours

Wednesday – Saturday, 10-6pm

Sunday, 10-5pm

This exhibition examines water as the first element we came to know, as it gently cradled us and held us. Water is one of the four primary elements from which all of life is created, along with fire, air and earth. Water is a predominant and vital element that connects us to the land and to one another. The works selected for the exhibition explore this element and its different means in unique emotional, spiritual, cultural and socio-political ways.

Akshata Naik’s work Infinite Journeys 2.0, When the Sky Meets the Ocean and Voyage-I, reference the fluid notion of migration and its complexities when ‘starting a new life’ and its physical, social and emotional transition while echoing voices of unsettling journeys from a local and global perspective. Mirna Chacín’s, Elegy for Souls on Hold, explores the concept of water as a healing vehicle that allows communities to grieve and mourn the loss of their loved ones particularly during the current pandemic but also during the migration journey of many around the world. My Blue by Peter Owusu-Ansah is a personal and emotional exploration of the colour blue and its infinite shades. This series evokes a metaphor of the representational characteristics of the water by using blues in the aspect of squares. Each work provokes a different kind of emotion from light and darkness, joy and mystery. Shabnam Afrand reflects on mythological and symbolic elements and historical geopolitical characteristics that come from her Iranian heritage. In The Green Summit, she investigates the concept of life and death by creating a memorial that references the fluent natural elements such as blood which nurtures many cultural and contemporary political vertices. The Water and Land Protection Banners by the Onaman Collective created by Isaac Murdoch and Christi Belcourt are a critical and pressing statement for action and support. These banners, representing wildlife and natural elements, accompanied by slogans protesting pipelines and phrases related to First Nation spiritual traditions, continue to raise awareness about the ongoing exploitation of natural resources and extractive activities.

Virtual tour

Works

Akshata Naik

Bloody Boats: Infinite Journeys 2.0

2021
Site-specific installation. 4,500 paper boats pinned on foam core wall surfaces

Bloody Boats: Infinite Journeys 2.0 references the fluid notion of migration and its physical, social and emotional complexities echoing voices of unsettling journeys from a local and global perspective. Through this installation, the artist represents a personal experience as an immigrant and seeks to resonate with the journey of many who look for a better life, safe space or a refugee as a result of different socio-political conflicts and/or critical natural events.

Born and raised in Mumbai, Akshata Naik is a contemporary visual artist, educator, and administrator based in Toronto. Naik’s work reflects upon her lived experiences of moving homes, cities and countries through a lens of migration, displacement, home and belonging.

When the Sky Meets the Ocean

2020
VR Projection 00:01:15 min

In When the Sky Meets the Ocean, Naik takes her previous work, Bloody Boats: Infinite Journeys 2.0 into the virtual realm. She creates 3D boats immersed in a digital space to explore concepts of dislocation, translation and migration. Demystifying the concept of space, the sense of horizon and the idea of place, this work evokes the millions of migrants who continue to relocate themselves and their dreams during the uncertainty of the current pandemic.

Voyage-I

2021
Sculptural volumes in plywood coated with industrial paint

With Voyage-I, Naik moves into a new interactive and community-engaged component where the audience is invited to write on the medium-scale indoor sculptures and share their own stories. The simplified forms of a boat made of plywood allow visitors to engage in new ways as they continue to explore different layers of the existing local and global diasporas.

Mirna Chacín

Elegy for Souls on Hold

2021
Immersive video mapping installation with an augmented reality component

Elegy for Souls on Hold is a poetic memorial that celebrates the life of those who have passed due to COVID-19. Using photography, mapping projection, sound and an augmented reality component, the artist revisits metaphors of life, memory and resilience.

Inspired by Jorge Manrique’s Hispanic Renaissance funeral elegy, the installation evokes a walk into a dreamlike water stream. By using a free augmented reality app on their smartphones, visitors can discover portraits of those who have passed alongside short videos celebrating their life as the water projection continues to flow in the background.

Mirna Chacín is a Venezuelan-born Canadian visual artist whose work reflects on concepts around loss and grief, uprooting, belonging, and cultural traditions through the engagement of communities from a perspective of diversity and inclusion.

Peter Owusu-Ansah

My Blue

2020 – 2021
Digital-generated art printed on canvas

My Blue is a series of digital-generated works that focus on blue as a background, as we are under a large blue sky surrounded by the blue ocean. From a very personal and emotional exploration, Owusu-Ansah has produced over 150 combinations of blue and its infinite shades that evoke representational characteristics of the water by using blues in the aspect of squares.

From a personal and life experience perspective Owusu-Ansah shares:
“I have produced more than 950 works using photoshop since 2017, but more than 150 works focusing on blue backgrounds; some with fire colours and some with no fire. I’ve been battling against the best of my best repeatedly as well as battling against what the art world considers it great in the art world. What I am showing here is my top best results. To me, they are the greatest in the world. I do this because the world is controlled by hearing people with abled bodies and they have excluded us in many ways throughout history. To me, they have consumed knowledge from life resources and they have lived off that. That is like they are the only ones who can consume and call themselves great as well as many of them have been earning a living the way we haven’t. It is my challenge to try to do the same. I hope you enjoy my work.”

Peter Owusu-Ansah is a Deaf visual artist. He believes he can communicate through our eyesight without words. He has explored the curiosity of seeing life through paintings, photographing and manipulating photographs into pop art.

Onaman Collective
(Isaac Murdock – Christi Belcourt)

Water and Land Protection Banners

2014 – Ongoing
Inkjet print on adhesive vinyl

Onaman Collective’s Water and Land Protection Banners are a critical and pressing statement for water and land protection actions. By using phrases about the sacred nature of the environment, silhouettes that resemble pictographs of Ojibway spirit writing and slogans protesting pipelines, they continue to raise awareness about the ongoing exploitation of natural resources and extractive activities across fifteen First Nation territories.

The Thunderbird Woman — half woman and half bird, is a recurring symbol in these banners as it represents a powerful figure of protection, transformation and nurturing across different Indigenous belief systems.

The Onaman Collective was founded in 2014 by Indigenous artists and environmentalists Christi Belcourt, Isaac Murdoch, and Erin Konsmo. Their art-based activism raises the voices of communities engaged in water and land protection actions as they relate to First Nation communities and territories.

Shabnam Afrand

The Green Summit

2021
Multimedia Installation

The Green Summit is an interactive multimedia installation that investigates the symbolic fluid transition between life and death through the implementation of different cultural and historic symbols. In this work, Afrand remembers the 176 passengers who died in the Ukrainian flight tragedy in 2020.

This memorial conceptual piece made of wood, mirrors, artificial grass, sound and video components is inspired by a popular song, by poet “Aref Ghazvini”: Az khune javanane vatan laleh damideh’. The theme of this song refers to a mythological hero in Shahnameh was written by Ferdosi about the upside-down tulip in Zagros Mountains that grows from the blood of Siavash, the character in Shahnameh. After hundred years, this poem has been used as a political lyric in Iran and continues to represent the resilience of its people.

Shabnam Afrand is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, born and educated in Tehran, Iran. Her practice revolves around concepts of memory and longing through the construction of symbolic objects and settings.

Virtual tour