The Night of Museums 2022
The Art of Living - On Immigration, Community and the Migration of Symbols

On the occasion of the 18th edition of the European Night of Museums, the Canadian Cultural Centre invites you to discover its brand new exhibition The Art of Living by artists Jude Abu Zaineh, Soheila Esfahani and Xiaojing Yan.

Lineup:  

Free visit of the exhibition from 6pm to 11pm (last entrance 10:30pm) 

• 7pm: Conversation with the artists Jude Abu Zaineh, Soheila Esfahani and Xiaojing Yan (in English) BOOKING
• 8:30 pm: Guided tour by the curator 
• 9:30 pm: Guided tour by the curator 

Unknown to each other, from distant countries, these three artists and their work are coming together for the first time. What they have in common is the always strange feeling of living in an in-between place, not quite rooted, suspended between two worlds, attached to the symbols of belonging to their cultures of origin, yet diverting them. Food, desire, religion and protection are all issues in their art, as are technology, globalization and consumer society.

Both Eastern and Western, these women who came to Canada from China, Palestine and Iran forge ties that transform, distort and augment strong symbolic images: a staircase, a bridge, a word, a poem, decorative motifs, myths and legends. They give another dimension to the notion of cultural identity by presenting the viewer with hybrid and industrialized objects that are denatured, far from any idealization of the elsewhere and the past. A blood-red filamentary goddess, decorative motifs teeming with biological life, commercial reproductions of a traditional bird from 3D prints and other works that allow symbols to freely migrate constitute a powerful, intimate reflection on an art of displacement and diaspora.

Curator: Catherine Bédard