DISPLACED considers the transforming relationships to space and identity at the hand of forced loss of land, culture and community. The exhibition presents the work of four artists: Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, a Vancouver-based artist from El Salvador, Naji Chalhoub, a Lebanese artist based in Beirut, Mandana Mansouri, an Iranian artist living in Vancouver, and Jackie Traverse, an Ojibwe artist from Lake St. Martin First Nations in Manitoba. Through a diversity of subject matter and mediums including drawing, painting, animation, and photography, these artists consider their personal experience of displacement. Though unique in their differing perspectives, their works hold a common thread of loss, complex change, and disconnection to culture and the notion of home.
Displacement continues to be an important global and local phenomenon. Colonization, persecution, war, environmental crises and political upheaval have created refugees, internally displaced individuals, vulnerable migrants and those living in exile. The ubiquity of displaced persons and the porosity of global borders points to a new chapter in our collective existence, one that is shared, cohesive, and marked by a fundamental changing definition of home and identity. DISPLACED disturbs the entropic distinction between “us/here” vs. “them/there” and invites viewers to rethink identifiers such as citizenship, borders, our past and current connection to home, land, and to one another. |