ExhibitionsA Dream of Return
September 29 - December 14, 2024
Adeyemi Adegbesan, IntergalacticSafehouse.exe, 2021, digital media. Courtesy of the artist.
Weaving together difficult pasts and hopeful futures through creative resistance in the present.
“…they used to know, and dream, and return, and dream, and know, and return…”
In the closing lines of his 1990 poem The Tragedy of Narcissus The Comedy of Silver, Mahmoud Darwish imagines the possibility of return not as a backwards glance, but as an indefinite futurity; a dream. Doing so, the exiled Palestinian poet helps envision a network of diasporic places and times, weaving together difficult pasts and hopeful futures through creative resistance in the present.
Looking to socially- and politically engaged artistic practices, A Dream of Return highlights diverse creative responses to the theme of “return,” broadly defined. The artists reveal poetic links between dispossessed peoples and material cultures, visualizing histories and futures of liberatory return. This conceptualization of “return” interlinks and complicates artistic self-expressions of Indigeneity, diaspora, belonging, community and identity.
This exhibition asks: What might it look like to return — or to return to — culturally-significant lands, cultures and objects? Which modes of artistic return can materially or symbolically contribute to healing historical ruptures? And how might such artistic interventions help form resistant, decolonizing allyships in the present?
Theo Jean Cuthand’s Homelands unpacks the above questions by drawing links across his two lines of ancestry—Scots and Cree—and their respective legacies of colonialism and dislocation. Rana Nazzal Hamadeh traces her origins in Palestine using natural materials that materially and conceptually link colonial projects here and abroad.
Adeyemi Adegbesan’s Afrofuturist practice remixes images of traditional masks with ones from masquerade traditions and pop culture, symbolically returning them to living, dynamic communities. The possibility of return to historically significant places is explored by Nic Cooper and Farouk Kaspaules, who reimagine lands as they have been shaped by political conflict.
Curated by
Pansee Atta
Artists in the exhibition
Adeyemi Adegbesan, Nic Cooper, Theo Jean Cuthand, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Farouk Kaspaules
Credits
Supported by a 2022 “Curatorial Projects: Indigenous and Culturally Diverse” grant from the Ontario Arts Council
