Feminist Practices: Lateral Moves
A Space Gallery Toronto
Jamelie Hassan & Leila Sujjir
Curated by Corinna Ghaznavi
Opening Reception & Curatorial Talk: 9 September 1999, 7 – 9pm
Exhibition of new work by two established mid-career artists: Jamelie Hassan and Leila Sujjir. This project is developed by SAVAC and curated by an independent curator Corinna Ghaznavi. The exhibit also includes a curator’s talk and slide presentation by the curator on the two participating artists.
The works in this exhibition are video and sculpture installations, investigating the ‘lateral moves’ that women are required to make. Where the assumption is that multiple subjectivities are inherently embodied by women, and specifically explores these subjectivities as they relate to the post-colonial paradigm. Concepts of post-colonialism and (post) feminism have concentrated on the idea of interstices, as an experiential site that does not exist outside of the mainstream but rather parallel and thus linked to it. The complex web of culture as we live it in a ‘multicultural’ country can only be pinned down when approached as the personal and temporal.This entails making sense rather than defining, of opening up to the contingency rather than presenting a closed narrative.
Artistic practice, understood as stories from the interstices, has the unique ability to mesh the personal with the political, the myth with the factual, and thereby make sense in a broadened and unique way. Both Jamelie Hassan and Leila Sujjir, as Canadian women of Middle-Eastern and Asia descent, are situated within this paradigm that post-colonial and critical theory attempt to dissect. Sujjir explores cultural hybridity signaling a broadened community, in ’Luminous Wallpapers, for Jackson,’ an installation consisting of three channel video work with sound, framed inside six copper plates with photo murals on them. Hassan’s video addresses aspects of language and identity, through two video installations: one centering around the travel journals of Millie Harris, the other around a lithograph printed in 1793 showing the British Marquis Cornwallis taking the two sons of Tippoo Sultan hostage.
GALLERY
