Opening Reception: Friday, January 27 at 8 p.m.
Exhibition Talk/Tour: Sunday, January 29 at 12:30 p.m.
with Jamelie Hassan and Professor Lynne Bell
Since the 1970s, Jamelie Hassan’s work has been influenced by cultural politics, social activism, and her background as a Canadian born to immigrants from Lebanon. Jamelie Hassan: At the Far Edge of Words is the first exhibition surveying the 40-year career of this award-winning, London, Ontario artist. Featured are watercolours, photographs, ceramics, a billboard, and multi-media installations.
The exhibition’s title honours Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008. One of his poems begins, “I come from there and I remember,” and concludes, “I learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one: Home.”
In her practice, Hassan has maintained that artists have a responsibility to address the important issues of their time. The works in this show, produced from 1978 to 2009, indicate her abiding interest in cultural and political history and issues of text, language, memory, and identity.
Because . . . there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad, the billboard project located on 25th Street, east of Second Avenue (facing west), features a photograph Hassan took in the late 1970s, during her first visit to Baghdad, where she was studying Arabic. In 1991, she conceived the billboard as a response to the Gulf War, and displayed it in the downtown areas of Windsor, ON; London, ON; and Vancouver, BC. Though nearly two decades have passed since the Gulf War, Hassan’s evocative combination of text and image continues to resonate with global events.
Hassan’s works reflect perspectives from her travels throughout North America, Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, alongside her views from her hometown: London, Ontario. She is a well-known artist, writer, curator, and lecturer. Her work is represented in major Canadian collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Glenbow Museum, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. She has received numerous honours, among them the 2001 Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts. In 1993, she exhibited a billboard, Linkage, in downtown Saskatoon, as part of the Mendel Art Gallery project, The Post-Colonial Landscape: A Billboard Exhibition.
Jamelie Hassan: At the Far Edge of Words is curated by Melanie Townsend, and organized and circulated by Museum London. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, co-published by Museum London and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. |
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