Are You Buying These With Loonies Or Toonies?
Soheila Esfahani

May 21 – June 14, 2025
Opening Reception: May 24, 1 - 3pm

Join us May 24, 10 - 5 pm for Doors Open! Artist will be present through the event.

Are You Buying These With Loonies Or Toonies? is a continuation of Esfahani’s research and art practice which investigates the terrains of cultural translation through the theoretical framework of Homi K. Bhabha.  In this exhibition, Esfahani is particularly exploring stereotype as otherness and Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence, which manifests as a split between appearance of an original and its expression as different and repetitive. This body of work is inspired by artifacts from the Aga Khan Museum’s collection, collected objects and imagery during Esfahani’s recent artist residency in Mexico City, and collected Canadiana objects. Her work questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture through the repetitive nature of stereotypical imagery and uses the language of stereotype in order to destabilize the subjectification and cultural identification that occurs through stereotypical discourse.

Soheila Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran, and moved to Canada in 1992. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from University of Waterloo and a Master of Fine Arts from Western University. Esfahani is an award-winning visual artist and recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. She is a recipient of 2016 Waterloo Region Arts Awards and was nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, UK in 2015. Her work has been exhibited at the Aga Khan Museum, Canadian Cultural Centre Paris, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Cambridge Art Galleries among others, and has been collected by various public and private institutions including the Canada Council’s Art Bank. Her coin design for the Royal Canadian Mint’s Celebrating Canada’s Diversity Collection was released in limited mintage gold and silver coins in 2024. She is an Assistant Professor at Western University in London, Ontario and is a member of the Red Head Gallery in Toronto.

For more information visit: soheila.ca| @soheila.esfahani