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The Manitoba Craft Council’s latest exhibit sees five unique artists come together find common ground in their immigrant experiences.
It’s Familiar combines the works of Persian weaver Maryam Bagheri, multi-disciplinarian Desa Kalem, Ethiopian sculptor Netsanet Shawl, Filipino floral artist Lourdes Still and Peruvian arts educator Giancarlo Vitor. Over the course of six weeks, the artists met to discuss their creative journeys and to explore shared experiences that they have creating art in Canada – a place that may still feel “unfamiliar”. Those conversations were what ultimately shaped the exhibition.
For curator Alireza Bayat, the journey started back in 2022 with a desire to provide more agency to the artists and give them more agency in the creation process. “We can break down the power of, let’s say, the authority of the curator, the very classical notion of the curator,” he says, “someone who’s in charge of the exhibition comes up with the idea, starting with the idea in the square one and ending with install.”
In this sense, all of the artists in It’s Familiar – who responded to an open call – are part of a democratized approach that Bayat describes as participatory design. Originally designed in Nordic countries for industrial workers, this model ensures more agency for labourers (in this case, artists) in the curatorial and installation processes.
That agency was paired with an environment that Bayat created of building close relationships between the artists that established a connection based on their backgrounds. “Throughout these constant meetings [in] the first six, seven weeks, they were all building our core activity around human communication,” says Bayat, “because living out all these seemingly different elements of where you’re coming from, what language you speak in, and how you sound when you speak English as a second language... when you leave all of the things behind, you see that there is a very solid core of human condition and human communication.”
“We have the same worries about the future of our kids, the same worries about our planet. We had the same anxieties that probably forced us to leave our source community and come to Canada. You all of a sudden find out that despite all those differences that sit on the top of the water, when you dive deep in, there is this unified core of agreements.”
It’s Familiar is on display at the Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library on Cumberland Avenue until October 25. Gallery hours and more information can be found at the Manitoba Craft Council’s website.