The Tool That Could Part Tangled Things - Soheila Esfahani

About

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" that appears in the chapbook 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.