Please join us on Thursday September 12 from 5-8 pm, for the opening of the fall term exhibitions at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery (UWAG), featuring the work of artists Sadko Hadžihasanović and Emily Neufeld. The exhibitions will run from September 12 to December 7, 2024. No admission.
Sadko Hadžihasanović War and Piece
Borrowing from the title of Leo Tolstoy’s historical chronicle of the Napoleonic Wars and the 1812 invasion of Russia, Sadko Hadžihasanović’s War and Piece is a similarly fragmented view of his homeland in the wake of war. Following the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s; Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina engaged in a bitter civil war prompted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawing on his own experiences and observations as an émigré from Bosnia during this period, Hadžihasanović’s paintings contrast idyllic Arcadian depictions of daily life in this still largely rural region, with the presence of United Nations peacekeepers and an abundance of firearms: ‘piece’ being American slang for a handgun. From the artist’s point of view, the domestic is never far removed from the martial. Portraits of friends and townspeople are shown posing with long guns. Unarmed soldiers are depicted relaxing while gathering to eat. Masterful paintings on copper capture bathers idling along the banks of the river Una. The uneasy tensions and contradictions depicted are perhaps best illustrated by the artist’s short hand-drawn animations, including Kids with Guns, named after a song by the pop band Gorillaz, in which children play war but it is not entirely clear whether they carry handguns or water pistols. Hadžihasanović’s work is at once a love letter to his homeland and a sobering reflection on the curious nature of post-war peace in the region.
Sadko Hadžihasanović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and earned his MFA at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, before emigrating to Canada in 1993. Since then, he has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in public galleries and artist-run spaces across Canada. His work is currently the focus of a concurrent retrospective War and Piece 1984-2024, at the Contemporary Gallery of Cultural Centre, Pančeva, Serbia. He is the recipient of multiple visual arts grants from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts. Sadko Hadžihasanović is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto (gallery website).
Sadko Hadžihasanović, Last Supper (detail), 2020, oil on pastel on Masonite. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Emily Neufeld Prairie Invasions: A Homecoming
The work in Prairie Invasions: A Homecoming interlaces abandoned farmhouses with the history of their inhabitants and creates a moment of pause and empathy for the lives that took place in these specific sites, but also for the land that the houses are built upon. Humans are changing our landscape at an increasingly rapid rate. On Turtle Island specifically, the relatively recent colonial occupation has left tremendous impacts on people, communities, languages and cultures, as well as homes, gardens, forests, plains and fields. The multitude of settlers that now live here brought a world of flora and fauna to this place. Some of them are invasive species, while others have naturalized and are beneficial contributors to the communities that are already here. Prairie Invasions asks viewers to consider how each of us participates in the multiple communities we are a part of, both human and non-human alike. Can we learn from the dandelion and enrich the ecosystems we are part of?
Prairie Invasions: A Homecoming is co-presented with the Durham Art Gallery. The exhibition will be on display concurrently in Durham, Ontario from September 7-November 17 (gallery website).
Emily Neufeld received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2013. She lives and works on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples in what is currently named North Vancouver. She is committed to examining her Mennonite and Scottish settler colonial histories in understanding her relationship to this place as Indigenous land. Recent solo exhibitions include Prairie Invasions: A Hymn (2022, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, AB), Before Demolition: Tides (2019, Eyelevel Gallery, NS), Motherlands (The Pole, Den Haag, ND), and Before Demolition (2017, Burrard Arts Foundation, BC). The artist participates in community sharing gardens, and sees soil and labour as fundamental to her research process.
Emily Neufeld, Prairie Invasions: A Hymn (detail), 2022, photo-mural. Photo courtesy of the artist.