Current
September 20 - December 7, 2024
Sanaz Mazinani: From Elsewhere to Here
From Elsewhere to Here
Sanaz Mazinani
Curated by Helen Gregory
Sanaz Mazinani, Shadow Wars, 2014/2024 (detail view). Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery
From Elsewhere to Here brings together elements of Mazinani’s art practice that are taken from multiple previous exhibitions, creating an archaeological survey of the past and present. Vision, perception, conflict, and war have been important themes in Mazinani’s practice for two decades, and still resonate within her practice and the broader socio-cultural landscape today.
Suspended coloured acrylic panels cast coloured shadows that combine and recombine, shifting how we perceive the other elements in the installation. These colour filters invite us to think about how we receive information, and to consider the lenses that affect our perception. These chromatic illuminations cast light across deceptively beautiful wall-paper panels that offer a different reading on closer viewing. Mazinani’s tessellated wallpaper panels initially suggest abstracted images derived from Islamic ornamentation. However, when examined more closely, the fractured imagery reveals the machinery of war repeated infinitely. These kaleidoscopic images fold in on one another: a soldier stands in a desert landscape; a drone pierces the cerulean sky. This work challenges us to critically analyse what we are seeing when we look at images of war and the rhetoric that surrounds it, as well as referencing the use of digital technologies in military operations, specifically focusing on images of unmanned drones.
The room is punctuated by symmetrical wooden cut-outs of hands raised in protest. The symmetrical nature of these hands directly references the work of Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin’s figure-ground studies into perceptual shifts between an image of a vase and silhouetted profiles of a human face - each image delineated by the other. Such images are known as bistable, a term derived from physics referring to the ability for something to exist in two states. In psychology, bistable images possess the capacity to be perceived in two different ways. As our perception oscillates between the two, we are confronted by the challenge of simultaneously holding conflicting images, ideas, viewpoints, or perspectives, even though we know both to be real. This conflict parallels the struggle to reconcile the horror of wars across the globe, which invariably have two sides – each with its own rhetoric.
The installation is underscored by an audio component, co-created with her brother Mani Mazinani. The sound of footsteps walking at a steady pace traverses the room, suggesting the rhythmic footfalls of soldiers marching in step or of people walking at a protest. The recording slowly disintegrates into white noise, as if the listener is being subsumed by the crowd. The sound of static also suggests the end of a news cast, a censoring, an obliteration of information. Throughout Mazinani’s installation, each element holds multiple potential interpretations, challenging the viewer to consider their own perceptions and biases. How do external forces, such as mainstream and social media, influence our internal values and what can we do to uphold these values?
From Elsewhere to Here invites the audience to perform the acts of perceiving both visually and aurally, questioning our perceptions and the outside forces that influence it, and making connections to current socio-political conditions in order to look towards a lens shift for a more hopeful future.
About the artist
Sanaz Mazinani is an artist, educator, and curator based in Tsí Tkarón:to/Toronto, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, including Mississaugas of the Credit, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples. Working across the disciplines of photography, sculpture, and large-scale multimedia installations, Mazinani creates art objects that invite a rethinking of how we see and experience knowledge. Informed by the visual rhetoric and confounding presence of media circulation, her multidisciplinary practice aims to politicize the proliferation and distribution of images, invite critical reflection, and forefront social justice and environmental movements.
Mazinani is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She holds an undergraduate degree from Ontario College of Art & Design and an MFA from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the West Vancouver Museum, and Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California. Her projects have been featured in venues throughout Canada as well as China, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Iran, Switzerland, the UAE, UK, and USA. Mazinani’s work has been written about in Artforum, artnet News, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, among others. She has received grants from the Canada Council, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts, and her work is held in public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the City of San Francisco.
Related Programming
Opening Reception
Friday, September 20 from 6:00 to 8:00p.m.
Remarks @ 6:30p.m.
Cash bar. Complimentary after hours parking available at select campus lots. Learn more
Free | Open to the public
Join us in celebrating the launch of our fall exhibition schedule among campus partners and community members. Meet exhibiting artists and hear from our exhibition curators about Sanaz Mazinani: From Elsewhere to Here and In Search of a Loss of Self.
Curator-led Exhibition Tours
Saturday, October 5 from 1:00 to 3:00p.m.
Complimentary after hours parking available at select campus lots. Learn more
Free | Open to the public
Learn more about our Fall exhibitions from the curators! Drop in for a guided exhibition tour of Sanaz Mazinani: From Elsewhere to Here and In Search of a Loss of Self: The Language of Alterity.
McIntosh Gallery & Art Now! Present: Sanaz Mazinani
Thursday, November 14 from 7:00 to 9:00p.m. on Zoom
Free | Registration is required
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with exhibiting artist Sanaz Mazinani. Hosted live on Zoom, this event is presented in partnership with the Department of Visual Art’s Art Now! Speakers’ Series with support from the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Western University.
In Search of a Loss of Self: The Language of Alterity
In Search of a Loss of Self:
The Language of Alterity
Curated by Soheila Esfahani and Mélika Hashemi
Jamelie Hassan, The Copyist 1995. Mixed media including black and white photograph, copper, ceramic tablet, ceramic slippers, 18th century manuscript Arabic/ Persian grammar, wooden bookstand, child's pencil sharpener, cotton cloth and wooden platform. McIntosh Gallery Collection, Western University. Purchase, The Walter and Duncan Gordon Charitable Foundation, 1996
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.
About the curators
Soheila K. Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran, and moved to Canada in 1992. She is a visual artist and Assistant Professor at Western University. Her research and art practice navigates the terrains of cultural translation in order to explore the processes involved in cultural transfer and transformation and questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture. She is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre Paris, Aga Khan Museum, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Cambridge Art Galleries among others and has been collected by various public and private institutions, including the Canada Council’s Art Bank.
Mélika Hashemi is an artist-researcher and writer based in Waterloo, Ontario. Using art and emerging technologies, she finds ways to creatively renew intersectionality and empowerment beyond screens and institutional walls. Mélika is the course author of Digital Spirituality and co-author of the book, O Lone Traveller: Rehearsing Self-Advocacy at the Border. Her research engages with critical arts pedagogies and visual discourse analyses, particularly within New Media art and newer -isms put forth by South Asian, Southwest Asian and North African (SASWANA) diaspora with proximity to Islam.
Related Programming
Opening Reception
Friday, September 20 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Remarks @ 6:30p.m.
Cash bar. Complimentary after hours parking available at select campus lots. Learn more
Free | Open to the public
Join us in celebrating the launch of our fall exhibition schedule among campus partners and community members. Meet exhibiting artists and hear from our exhibition curators about Sanaz Mazinani: From Elsewhere to Here and In Search of a Loss of Self.
Curator-led Exhibition Tours
Saturday, October 5 from 1:00 to 3:00p.m.
Complimentary after hours parking available at select campus lots. Learn more
Free | Open to the public
Learn more about our Fall exhibitions from the curators! Drop in for a guided exhibition tour of Sanaz Mazinani: From Elsewhere to Here and In Search of a Loss of Self: The Language of Alterity.
Join us in celebrating the launch of our fall exhibition schedule among campus partners and community members. Meet exhibiting artists and hear from our exhibition curators about Sanaz Mazinani: From Elsewhere to Here and In Search of a Loss of Self.
Contemporary art, visual culture, and art history have long played an important role in facilitating constructive social, political, and diverse cultural conversations.
As such, McIntosh Gallery stands by its responsibility to support the artistic freedom of all exhibiting artists by providing a safe and respectful space for them to express themselves and showcase their work and research. The works in these exhibition express the views of their creators and do not reflect the position of McIntosh Gallery or Western University.
