Shared View (2022)

Installation: Three-channel video projection, drywalls, wooden sculpture, rug, mirror, photographic mural collage, sound & interactive AR environment.

Shared View explores notions of identity, liminality, and belonging in a moving symbiotic relationship between Canada, the Sahara Desert, and the Judean Desert. Through video performances, objects, sound and AR augmented reality components, Messas-Waxman examines the idea of a permeable land that constantly negotiates its political, physical and imaginary borders with our memories, bodies and souls. With an attempt to question our sense of belonging, she relocates embodied experiences that intersect with multiple geographical locations and ideas of diaspora, (dis)placement and migration. As a transitional-being born and raised in-between cultural systems, Messas-Waxman shares her personal history through site-specific performances recorded at multiple times and locations over the course of three years of crossing borders. These recordings and archives are projected along a constellation of physical and virtual objects like wood, jars, paint and a flag. The installation brings the viewer closer to an intimate and multilayered dwelling experience beyond borders, cultures, and time.

HOME(LAND): Terra Firma explores the earth as a powerful natural element that connects us to the land, the territory that we inhabit and where we build the fabric of our home. The selected works tackle ideas of bio-politics, environmental governance, cultural borders, social displacement, and erasure from a perspective of individual resilience, community resistance, and participation.

This multimedia exhibition project examines how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with the fluid and shifting characteristics of identity, belonging, and home across and between races, regions, cultures, and nations. Artists from diverse backgrounds whose practice and work are infused by unique interracial complexities examine questions on concepts such as kinship, ancestry, memory, and racialization.

Claudia Arana

Commissioned by ArtworxTO, curated by Claudia Arana as part of Terra Firma HOME(LAND).

This research creation project draws on research supported by SSHRC—the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.