Art Metropole

#10948

011+91 | 011+92 - On Locational Identity

Art Gallery of Mississauga

Price

$18.00

Date

2013

Publisher

Art Gallery of Mississauga

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-1-927595-02-2

Size

17.5 × 25.5 × 0.5 cm

Length

58 

Description

Catalogue for the exhibition 001+91 | 001+92 at the Art Gallery of Missasauga from July 18 – Sepotember 7, 2013. 011+91 | 011+92 is a curatorial research project that aims to initiate a critical discourse and presentation on locational identity as explored and presented by first and second generation Canadians who hail from South Asia.

What part does a geographical divide play in notions of home, place and being? The dial codes from Canada to India and Pakistan open the dialogue.

Mississauga represents the diaspora of many cultures – an estimated 58% of citizens speak Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi as a first language. The artists in this exhibition respond to the act of communicating to, from or about home, framing contemporary artists at the forefront of a social conversation where identity may or not be central to the work, whereas life experience and humanistic values are at the forefront. In an age of when we are everywhere at once, how can being and displacement create a homing instinct?

In the Canada of tomorrow, home to an ever-increasing global diaspora and to heterogeneous, urban immigrant communities, can the hierarchical, colonial past be erased with emergent identities giving a new face to our nation? With the interface between ethnicity and the arts in Canada in the future being unpredictable, only one reality seems certain: a growing number and variety of artistic expressions of multiple and cross-cultural ethnicities comprise a strong future where a sense of home in conjunction with a connection to the new form a richer construct of self.

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