Curators: Nashwa Lina Khan, Thereza Eric and Salwa Regragui
Welcome to Ephemeral Echoes, a collection of multimodal poetry art pieces that explore the complex relationships between the self and the world around us. This exhibition presents work that pushes the boundaries of what many know as traditional poetry and challenges viewers to experience a new form of artistic poetic expression. Multimodal poetry transcends the boundaries of traditional page poetry.
Each piece in this exhibition is a unique reflection of the poet's interpretation of self and or the world around them. Through a combination of visual, auditory, and experiential elements these pieces offer an immersive and thought-provoking experience that invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships with the world.
As you explore the exhibition, you will encounter works that are both transient and enduring, offering glimpses into the fleeting nature of existence and the work we produce, as well as. the persistent human desire for meaning and connection. From intricate collages that explore everyday life to interactive installations that invite viewers to become part of the artwork, each piece presents a unique perspective on the themes of self and the world.
Let's see some of the most outstanding art pieces in this exhibition:
Batrimoine. mémoire et fantômes
Nashwa Lina Khan
This piece takes from archival images of Bousbir - what was essentially a sex prison in Morocco during colonial occupation and news articles from the present about an ‘uncolonized’ Morocco.
The role of Moroccan women in the world is one that I explore throughout these pieces and my larger body of work. Haunting occupies social space and our worlds. Colonialism and slavery would not haunt us if it existed as a mere historical fact but our institutions are designed around them and our memories are imbued by them.
"you are a euphemism" is a body of self-portraits that seek to productively obscure my self to reveal a collective self. An assemblage of collages sourced from Psychology Today, Elle Magazine, and a Woman's World edition on female weight loss, supplemented by the University of Toronto's Varsity.
The Asemic Love Letters are an experiment with convention. The illegible text can be deciphered as a series of love letters and notes due to elements on and surrounding the pages. Furthermore, the texts are not codes or puzzles which can be solved. While writing the letter and working on creating possible better shapes and symbols.
“In “Self-Portrait Series”, ephemeral moments of self-reflection are shaped into images and words. These self-portraits go beyond my physical self, escaping instead the thoughts. I had as I self-consciously looked at myself in the mirror.
“Notes from the Land of The Commuter” is an ever-expanding project if geolocation and site-specific petry. For this series, I allowed the world around me, the world that plagues every walking hour of my days in this city, to engulf me.
The Value Village Poems are a series which combines found materials collected from several visits to the same Value Village location. Their title suggests a practice of hunting or searching for hand-me-down objects, but it also implies a practice of consumerism.
Self-Portrait in F Major is a series of Frankensteinesque self-portraits created out of selfies taken over the past decade, rotated and overlapped to produce a layered effect that represents the constant struggle to conceptualize a stable and coherent self, despite external intactness
This series, compromised of clipping from “J.K. Rowling Writes abiyt Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issus” and Chapter 18 of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, is a radical form of erasure poetry in which the rest of the page is discarded entirely, allowing for subsequent decontextualization and reappropriation of the source author’ words in order to tell a alternative narrative.
