21 WADE AVE #2 | TORONTO
It comes to me in waves | curated by Sayem khan
1 August – 7 September 2024
Artists: Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Delali Cofie, Sukaina Kubba, Rajni Perera, Nep Sidhu, and Kendra Yee
It comes to me in waves explores the landscape of memory through material languages of artists whose practices engage in translations of remembrance. Within the exhibition, themes of selfhood, national and diasporic identities, ancestry, and intergenerationality come to the fore, weaving the viewer into a tapestry of intricate and interlinked histories that illuminate the richness and potency of collective and individual memories. The title alludes to the reverberative experience of memories - how they wash over us during particular moments of nostalgia, and leave to come back again. Works in the exhibition speak to the cyclical nature of time and the experience of that cyclicality as embodied in the feeling of nostalgia, receding and crashing back, like waves of a sea to a shore.
In the exhibition, memories open up to subjective and contextualized interpretations, sculpting conventions of history and remembrance as ever-evolving landscapes of experiences, rather than fixed moments in time. The emotional landscape of remembrance becomes more, or at least equally, compelling as any factual analysis or understanding of what has transpired or taken place. A metaphysical resonance of time and space emerges that focuses on the experience of remembering and how that informs our relationship to ourselves and each other. The habitation of memory, or how our memory lives within us, and our relationships with the act of remembrance, is intimately retrieved and translated by the artists in this exhibition. Like the scar of an old wound, or the impression of a body on a bed well slept on, memory sits within and awakens a tender resolution in the act of its own remembrance.
Ernesto Cabral de Luna practices the deconstruction of familial memories alongside the production of his own. Making sense of his family’s movement across borders from Mexico to Canada as an exile, Cabral de Luna constructs works that combine transfers of archived family photos with various scrap materials. In his study of his own intergenerational memory, the artist interrogates the fragmentary nature of his family’s histories that he holds on to, as well as the informal vernacular of architecture that is constructed in Global South countries post-colonization. Cabral de Luna contemplates architecture as a physical translation of his relationship to shaping and preserving his cultural identity beyond the borders of his native home - haphazard and self-determined. In his explorations with corrugated metal and broken glass, Cabral de Luna examines the political implications of his family’s migration, and the materials’ synonymousness with adaptation, impermanence, poverty, and ad hoc measures of securitization. Intermixed with his own photos taken on a recent visit to Mexico, Cabral de Luna’s work negotiates his agency in his remembrance, and the legitimacy of his relationship to not only his family’s ties, but his national identity existing in two worlds simultaneously.
Delali Cofie proposes an amalgamation of one’s memories in order to make sense of the events that have led to the production and becoming of oneself. Pulling inspiration from West African masquerade garments, Cofie worked with local artisan communities in Accra, Ghana to produce costumes that blend materials which, for him, are intrinsically tied to personal and familial memories. Combining his and his father’s old clothes, linens, and bed cloths with raffia, Cofie attempts to physically manifest a true sense of selfhood in his work. Stemming from Otoghe-Toghe masquerade practices in Arombga, Nigeria, it is believed that these costumes transform their wearers into ancestral, metaphysical beings, symbolically playing into Cofie’s hopes for the ascension of the true self in the spirit of wearing one’s memories. The figures depicted in Cofie’s portraits are invited to adorn not only the costumes, but simultaneously the entirety of themselves. The result is a striking collage of portraiture that invites the viewer to reflect on what it means to be sure in one’s selfhood, and how one’s past propels them towards the present moment in which they find themselves situated.
In consideration of objects as retainers of memories and histories, Sukaina Kubba's works in the exhibition explore rugs and carpets as performing in a similar function. Kubba meticulously traces and translates rug designs, drawings, and archives in hand drawn objects made using PLA filaments.* Kubba’s interest in how objects hold memories related to familial histories is prevalent in her fascination with traveling objects, namely textiles and rugs, as carriers of cross-cultural and geographical histories. Parsing through familial and institutional archives of carpets, Kubba extensively researches and emulates rugs from the South West Asia and North Africa region, tracing and retracing their designs in her explorations in order to create an ever increasing distance between the original objects and its drawn likeness. Through this, Kubba seeks to invoke and translate the narratives of travel, trade, and acquisition of rugs, and the domestic encounters and fictional stories they come to represent along the way.
Rajni Perera pushes the foundational experience of remembrance, underpinning her work with critical fabulations on the possibilities afforded to us through explorations of our past. Pulling from the shamanistic spiritual traditions of Yaku Tovil, from her country of origin, Perera preciously uncouples Sri Lanka’s vast and overlooked histories from its colonized past. The artist weaves a new narrative history that draws from stories on pre-scientific astronomy, shamanism, and tribal and national histories to help us imagine ourselves embroiled in a rich tapestry of pasts and imagined futures. Within her works, Perera animates fantasies enriched by revelations of mythologies and stories that are delicately revealed to the viewer. Within this process, she articulates material and visual languages that illuminated her childhood and reawakens a compassion for folk traditions and communal values ever-present across Global South communities.
Nep Sidhu similarly works within the context of pre- and post-colonization histories from India, focusing on the experiences of Sikh livelihoods in the wake of British rule in the region. Informed by the values of Sikhism, Sidhu considers the impact of being taught to be a lifelong student that informs the making of one’s future by looking to the teachings and traditions of our pasts. Particularly inspired by oral and visual histories that are passed down generationally, Sidhu’s work performs in honor of the sonic resonances of our dialectical histories, and the transcendental and transformative power embedded in our ability to visualize the divine and unseen. Through this process, Sidhu envisions the self as not only a retainer of history and knowledge, but as the vessel that activates these aspects of ourselves to make something entirely new, that honours both ourselves and those who came before.
Kendra Yee’s work explores a foundational history of architectural and interior design in spaces of gathering through tile making, associating clay tiles with expressions of reverence for the ways memories function in our private and public lives. Over the course of her recent residency at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Yee invited submissions of personal memories in the form of drawn and written reflections. The artist spent time with others’ memories and translated over one hundred recollections into unique ceramic tiles that represent how the participants' memories, and in turn the viewers’, shape who we are and how we make our lives. Yee highlights the potency of storytelling as a producer of community care, and reminds us of our material attachments to memory, evoking the visceral feelings that are tied to our sentimentality.
Within the process of recollection, the subject matter of It comes to me in waves lends itself to a hybrid manifestation of identity, and allows us to reflect on how the theater of memory affords us stories by which we ourselves are formed in our visitations to a landscape of thought and experience. In their reflections on personal, national, and cultural histories, the artists in this exhibition offer up remembrance as a radical act of futurism, asking us to consider the emancipatory revelations offered through a critical remembering.
– Sayem Khan
*Polylactic Acid (PLA) filament is a recyclable, natural thermoplastic polyester that is derived from renewable resources such as corn starch or sugar cane. The filament is biodegradable under certain conditions with high heat capacity and high mechanical strength - used with 3D printing pens.
Ernesto Cabral de Luna is a Mexican lens-based artist working in Toronto. Utilizing both analog and digital processes, he merges experimental techniques with sculpture and installation, printing onto unconventional and manipulated surfaces to emphasize the multi-dimensionality and materiality of the image. Cabral de Luna received his BFA in photography from OCAD University in 2024, where he received the 2024 Barbara Astman Photography Award and the 2021 Wendy Coburn Art and Social Change Scholarship. A recipient of the 2024 Gallery44 Residency Award and the 2024 Partners in Art's Artist-Direct Grant, Cabral de Luna has exhibited at Ada Slaight, Xpace Cultural Center, and Abbozzo Gallery. In summer 2024, he was commissioned for a public mural by Luminato Festival at Finch Station, as well as a public billboard outside Artscape Youngplace for Critical Distance Centre for Curators. Cabral de Luna has worked on corporate commissions for The Toronto Raptors, Coors Light, and Walmart Canada.
Delali Cofie (b.1999) is a Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer and visual artist currently living in Toronto, Canada. Through storytelling he engages in multiple genres of photography such as fine art, documentary, and fashion. His personal work presents subtle beauty whilst exploring themes of family, self-formation, and becoming. Frequently creating work between his native city Accra and current city Toronto, his work tells a tale of two cities, linked by a diasporic thread. He has been exhibited in galleries across Ontario, namely Gallery 44 and Gallery 101. In 2022, his work was featured in legendary Ghanaian photographer James Barnor’s retrospective catalogue at the Arles Photography Festival. Delali had his first solo exhibition, A Place of Ours, included in the CONTACT Photography festival in Toronto (2022) whilst creating commissioned work for the Royal Bank of Canada. He is a recent graduate and medal winner for photography from OCAD University.
Sukaina Kubba (b. Baghdad, Iraq) is an artist based in Toronto. Kubba’s practice is multidisciplinary and material-based, relying on storytelling, drawing, and drawing connections. One of her central research projects considers rugs and other high-trade textiles as historic objects, as traveling heirlooms and artifacts, and as carriers of many lives and miles. She is interested in how these fabrics are made, purchased, rolled, wrapped, transported, settled or acquired, displayed, and unfurled—in homes, deserts, ships, and museum collections. Kubba makes installations, sculptures, and drawings using industrial materials such as rubber, liquid latex, 3D filament, found thread, and reused packaging. Kubba’s work was presented for Mercer Union’s SPACE Billboard Commission (Toronto), and has recently been shown at the plumb, The Next Contemporary, the Aga Khan Museum, and MOCA (all in Toronto), and in Scotland at the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Glasgow International Art Festival, and Dundee Contemporary Arts.
Rajni Perera explores issues of hybridity, futurity, ancestorship, immigration identity/cultures, monsters and dream worlds. In her work she seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of the icons and objects she creates, both scripturally existent, self-invented and externally defined. Thus creating a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force through which people can move outdated, repressive modes of being towards reclaiming their power. Recent exhibitions include Banners For New Empires at The Mackenzie Gallery (2019; duo with Nep Sidhu) ; TRAVELLER at Patel-Division Projects (2019); and Believe at The Museum Of Contemporary Art Toronto (2018). Perera’s Fresh Air (2019) was acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is the recipient of the 2022 MOCA Toronto Award and of numerous Canada Arts Council grants, including the York Wilson Memorial Award.
Nep Sidhu is an interdisciplinary practitioner who works through the metaphysics of form and spatial rhythm within the context of community and self-expression. Through material investigations of textile, sculpture, painting, video, and sound, Sidhu's work seeks symbolic pathways that help to realize the formlessness of the divine through endless possibility and search. Sidhu participated in exhibitions with the Nagoya City Museum, Japan Aichi Triennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; Esker Foundation, Calgary; Heard Museum, Phoenix; Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; and The Frye Museum of Art, Seattle; Glasgow International, Scotland. Most recently Nep Sidhu was featured in his first solo U.S. museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
Kendra Yee (b. 1995, Tkaronto/ Toronto) is an arts practitioner that seeks to materialize the truths and fictions of memory. Yee pulls tales from; personal stories, lived experience and collective narratives to develop site-specific installations that carve alternative archives. Yee has programmed and exhibited with: Patel Brown (Toronto), Heavy Manners (Los Angeles), The Artists Project (Toronto), Juxtapoz (NYC), The Letter Bet (Montreal), Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto), and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery as a part of the RBC Emerging Artist Program.
Sayem Khan is an arts professional currently working at Patel Brown in Toronto. Sayem is inspired by the modalities of diasporic lives that are made post-immigration. He has a background in human geography, graduating from the University of Toronto.