Other Names: Soheila K. Esfahani
– Soheila Esfahani, Artist’s Statement
Soheila K. Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran, and moved to Canada in 1992. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Western University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. She is an award-winning visual artist and recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. She is a recipient of the 2016 Region of Waterloo Arts Award and was nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom in 2015. Her work has been exhibited across Canada from Vancouver, British Columbia to Halifax, Nova Scotia and collected by various public and private institutions, including the Canada Council’s Art Bank. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at Western University and is a member of the Red Head Gallery in Toronto, Ontario.
Biography Courtesy of Soheila Esfahani
Soheila Esfahani’s practice questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture by re-contextualizing culturally specific ornamentation and various collected souvenir type objects. She navigates the terrains of cultural translation by exploring ornamentation as a form of “portable culture” that can be carried across cultures and nations. Her work aims to destabilize the origin of culture and reconstruct Homi Bhabha’s “the third space of in-betweeness”: a site of cultural translation, where locations of cultures are negotiated, and new narratives are adapted and hybridized.
Artist’s Statement Courtesy of Soheila Esfahani
CV Courtesy of Soheila Esfahani
Biography Profile Photo: Ali Golafshani
Courtesy of Soheila Esfahani
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