By: Jack Brittle, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Burlington Local-News.ca
From January 17 to April 26, the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) is the home of Roda Medhat’s first solo exhibition in a public institution, “Things I Can Fold, Deflate and Break.”
The exhibit is housed in the Lee-Chin Family Gallery and is spread out over three separate sections, each partially divided by a curved wall.
The 43-foot-long carpet behind the inflatable taxis is the only piece in the exhibit that was not specifically made for it. Medhat said that his inspiration came from a trip to historic Kurdistan, where he collected textiles and took pictures of metal work, symbols, and graphic design throughout the cities and the countryside. He said that the rug acts as a diary, or journal of the trip.
“When this show came up, the Art Gallery of Burlington had this big, beautiful curved wall,” Medhat said. “And I thought it would be a perfect place to fit that same work back in and have it live in a different way than when I had first shown it.”
“The Sheep in the Chevrolet” subverts the themes from a book of the same title.
He said that even more exciting than having a solo exhibition was the fact that the AGB approached him with the opportunity.
“It’s the space and the resources that were provided to me that really made it worthwhile, and kind of made it more than just a solo show,” Medhat said. “I mean, if you’ve seen the space, you see how grand and large it is. Not everyone is so lucky as to have a space so large. All the staff at the Art Gallery of Burlington are so great, and they provided me with so many resources to be able to execute this show the way that I wanted it.”
Medhat said that it’s not often that young artists get access to the resources needed to create and house large and complicated installations.
Medhat said his Kurdish heritage factors heavily into his work and is represented in the exhibit.
“I’m thinking about my culture and my heritage, bringing that to the forefront and making it visible, so it’s not just consumed by other countries that Kurds are forced to live in,” Medhat said. “That’s why a lot of the works are large and kind of a spectacle, really in your face and bright.”
“Some of the textile works are based on specific Kurdish textiles from different historical archives, and some of them are just imagined pieces,” Medhat said.
Other materials also feature in the exhibition, from neon lights to vinyl and other plastics. One sculpture features a warm pink sheep poised on top of a neutral-coloured car. Medhat said that the sculpture, “The Sheep in the Chevrolet,” is based on a book of the same name. “It was like a travelogue of this explorer who was travelling through the Middle East, specifically Kurdistan,” Medhat said. “It was filled with stereotypes and was this kind of orientalist text. It was meant to be like he’s travelling the region in his Chevrolet as a sign of progress, but the shepherds with the sheep are backwards. So, I took the title of the book and remade it as this sculpture where the sheep is dominating over the Chevrolet and questioning those ideas of progress.”
There are neon pieces adjacent to the sheep sculpture, which are based on a Kurdish language book from the 1960s. “It was one of the first books to try to teach the Kurdish language,” Medhat explained. “When it came out, it was banned, so the book was passed around in secret. Through literacy, there’s freedom. I took some of the illustrations and writing from that book, and redrew them into a moving image, a kind of simple animation. I also retained some of the text from the books to create a little poetic line.”
Across the exhibition, Medhat uses his various mediums to create a narrative, exploring how cultural memory and identity shift across borders and generations.
The neon pieces in the exhibition were inspired by an early Kurdish language textbook.
Medhat spoke about the title of the exhibition.
“When I’m thinking about things I can fold, I mean, that naturally falls into the realm of the textiles,” Medhat said. “And then I thought about the inflatables and the work I’d considered deflation. Finally, I chose ‘break,’ because the earliest days of ‘making’ for me as a kid were taking things apart. And, you know, naturally, when you’re taking something apart, sometimes you break it.”
“The title is about the materiality of the show, but also the metaphors for the works, for culture, heritage, and history,” Medhat continued.
To find out more about Medhat’s AGB exhibit, click here.
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