The Tool That Could Part Tangled Things - Soheila Esfahani

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October 4– 28, 2023

Reception: Saturday, October 14, 1 - 3 pm.

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present The Tool That Could Part Tangled Things an exhibition of new work by artist Soheila Esfahani.

Esfahani’s practice questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture and navigates the terrains of cultural translation through the theoretical framework of Homi Bhabha and the concept of the third space. By drawing on her own experience as an immigrant, her work aims to destabilize the origin of culture and reconstruct Bhabha’s the third space as a negotiated space of in-betweeness and a site of cultural translation, where locations of cultures are negotiated, and new narratives are adapted and hybridized.

The tool that could part tangled things is a response to a poem titled Second Generation in Light Years (Baseline Press, 2022) by Toronto-based poet Laboni Islam. Esfahani uses Google Translate for the translation of the poem from English to Farsi and embraces the inadequacy of the translated text as a way of introducing an element of foreignness. Therefore, the translation becomes “the staging of cultural difference” in Bhabha’s terms, in which the migrant’s struggle operates in a process of transformation and proposes the act of translation as a trope for the act of displacement. In this body of work, Esfahani uses language to dislocate the original and destabilize cultural identification in order to construct a space of in-betweeness.

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The Red Head Gallery

The Red Head Gallery is a professional artists’ collective committed to exhibiting the work of established and emerging artists and to encourage work that is critically engaged within a wide range of contemporary discourse.

Red Head artists create images and objects, manipulate spaces both theoretical and physical, participate in and organize events, and seek out opportunities to interact with other arts organizations locally, nationally, and internationally. Member artists have made The Red Head Gallery a continually evolving success and a place where significant careers are nurtured and sustained. Red Head artists, both past and present, maintain a high profile and consistently attract critical attention. The gallery's exhibitions have been highlighted and reviewed in noted newspapers, national and international art magazines and journals, on television, and in critically engaged blogs and web art sites.

The entity that is The Red Head Gallery is more than meets the eye. It is the embodiment of a concept as well as a physical space. It is a reflection of its seventeen artist-members who inspire, challenge and support one another's discipline through exhibitions and exchanges that bring their work to the wider community. The Red Head Gallery is also a community that facilitates engagement within the visual arts, for networking, and socializing, and contributing to meaningful discourse.

The collective has exhibited at the Hermes Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Blink Gallery in Ottawa, at ARC Gallery in Chicago, at the Kunsthaus Santa Fe in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and continues to pursue additional exchanges with other galleries abroad. The work of current and past Red Head artists can be found at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada and in major institutions and collections across the country and around the world.