Mapping Diasporic Identities
Mapping Diasporic Identities brings together six artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, installation, video, and multimedia storytelling. Each draws on personal histories, cultural heritage, and lived experiences in the diaspora to create works that question conventional ideas of identity and belonging. Their art reflects on themes such as displacement, resilience, gender, memory, and cultural hybridity, offering alternative narratives that challenge dominant perspectives. Through diverse materials and approaches, these artists invite viewers to consider how stories are carried across borders and how identity is continuously negotiated, reshaped, and reclaimed.
This exhibit is supported by Francesca Patterson through the Patterson Rozee Family Foundation in memory of her mother UWaterloo Distinguished Professor Emerita Nancy-Lou Patterson, the designer of the Grebel Chapel windows in 1964.
Wen Li
Wen Li’s work explores the deep personal and cultural significance of names, particularly for immigrants navigating new social and linguistic environments. She examines how original names carry layers of meaning such as heritage, family hopes, and history, while adopted names, chosen for ease or cultural adaptation, create a “third space” of identity. Through this lens, her work reveals the emotional complexity of balancing excitement, hope, uncertainty, and anxiety that can come with a new name. Naming becomes a powerful mechanism for cultural negotiation.
Tazeen Qayyum
Tazeen Qayyum uses the cockroach motif as a striking visual and symbolic device, transforming an image often associated with repulsion into a commentary on resilience, displacement, and belonging. Her intricate patterns and installations confront political intolerance and discrimination, reflecting how human life can be devalued in times of war and hate. For this exhibition, her sculptural installation arranges the motif in a concentric pattern to symbolize endurance and continuity in the face of contemporary social and political challenges.
JJ Lee
JJ Lee’s contribution to the exhibition is a reimagined fragment of a multimedia drawing installation originally exhibited at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Rooted in the discovery of her grandfather’s 1917 Head Tax certificate and other family artifacts, the work weaves together drawings, digital media, and archival materials to explore the legacy of exclusionary immigration policies. In this more intimate iteration, Lee opens space for reflection on memory, silence, and the ongoing presence of the past in diasporic life.
Paria Shahverdi
Paria Shahverdi’s works A Truck Goes Through the Tulip Field and Suppression2 combine expressionist and representational styles to examine oppression, displacement, and resilience. Motifs such as a flowing dress evoke the lived experiences of women navigating patriarchal structures, migration, and violence. Through her imagery, Shahverdi contrasts destruction with persistence and invites viewers to reflect on how memory, migration, and solidarity can reconstruct identity in the diaspora.
Faseeh Saleem
In Objects in Transit, Faseeh Saleem investigates how identity is shaped and remembered through the objects carried or left behind during migration. His evolving archive spans three continents, tracing a personal and collective journey marked by symbols such as the Pakistani shalwar kameez and Sweden’s Dala horse. By highlighting the tension between remembrance and erasure, Saleem invites audiences to consider how material culture preserves, disrupts, and redefines narratives of belonging.
Sumaira Tazeen
Drawing on her training in South Asian miniature painting, Sumaira Tazeen presents a single-channel video work titled, (Dis)Entangle. (Dis)Entangle moves into the private realm, using a dupatta from her dowry to stitch and unpick stories of emotional abuse, resilience, and renewal. This work reflects on how cultural hybridity, gender norms, and displacement intersect within diasporic identities.
Grebel Gallery Hours (EST):
Monday to Thursday 8:30am - 7:30pm and Friday 8:30am - 4:30pm
Saturday to Sunday, by appointment.
Level 4, Conrad Grebel University College, 140 Westmount Rd N.
The gallery space is accessible via elevator, level 4 wheelchair icon.
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