میں اپنی ماں کی بیٹی ہوں | I am my mother’s daughter
میں اپنی ماں کی بیٹی ہوں | I am my mother’s daughter at the Campbell River Art Gallery in 2022. Photo credit: Bluetree Photography
An exhibition by artist Farheen Haq featuring video, sculptural installation, and lens-based work. It celebrates the resilience and knowledge systems of Haq’s mother who arrived in Canada in 1970 after an arranged marriage to her husband, to settle in the Niagara region (Ontario), Haudenosaunee Territory. The exhibition weaves together intergenerational relationships, connecting the experience of the artist’s mother with Haq’s experience as a child of that union and subsequently, its impact on her own experience as a mother. The artist’s work of inner housekeeping includes personal journeys through a family’s past as a way of moving forward, and political reconciliations determined by the territories on which she and her family arrived as guests. The artist explores how she carries the past and how she determines its legacy into the future.
Farheen Haq’s art practice is intensely personal. The viewer becomes a witness to her familial relationships, her role as daughter and mother, and the courage with which she approaches housekeeping and personal forms of reconciliation. Farheen engages openly and conscientiously with the history of her family and their migration to Canada from Pakistan and India to Pakistan before that, and her own pathways of movement and settlement on traditional Lək̓ʷəŋən Territory. We come to see her through this emotional labour and the poetic artworks that result. The exhibition consists of works from across the artist’s oeuvre that speak to identity, motherhood, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and personal forms of reconciliation.
میں اپنی ماں کی بیٹی ہوں | I am my mother’s daughter at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2023.
When is it available?
I am my mother’s daughter is available to tour from spring 2025.
Where else has it been?
The artworks presented in the exhibition are a survey of video, lens-based, and installation artwork from across Farheen Haq’s career that comprise her meditations on themes such as caregiving, intergenerational pain, resilience and forgiveness. This body of work, initially presented on Kwakwaka’wakw Territory and in relation to the Salish Sea at the Campbell River Art Gallery (2022), has traveled to the Hamilton Art Gallery (2023) on Haudenosaunee Territory where the family’s story first began in Canada. The exhibition is currently being presented at the The Reach Gallery Museum Stó:lō Téméxw, on the unceded Stó:lō Territory of the Semá:th and Mathxwí First Nations, over the summer and winter of 2024. Each iteration has evolved alongside Haq’s continued personal labour and the deepening of her artistic practice.
میں اپنی ماں کی بیٹی ہوں | I am my mother’s daughter at The Reach Gallery and Museum currently exhibiting until Spring 2025. Photo credit: Dale Klippenstein Photography
Why tour میں اپنی ماں کی بیٹی ہوں | I am my mother’s daughter to your space?
The exhibition works very well in a smaller, intimate space and transitions beautifully to a larger scale venue. The original exhibition showed in a space of 1476 sq. ft. The list of artworks can be adapted for a smaller space (Art Gallery of Hamilton, 860 sq. ft), and the size of the media artworks can be scaled up to accommodate a much larger area (The Reach Gallery Museum, 3350 sq. ft.). The dynamic offerings range from video, to installation, and lens-based work from across the artist’s oeuvre making it a full and in-depth examination of consistent thematics that weave their way throughout the artists’s life and work. The emotional impact and thought provoking aspects of the body of work communicate the artist’s personal labour and decolonizing approach at any scale. The exhibition honours the experiences of South Asian, Muslim immigrant communities, especially women, but has a wide empathic appeal due to the personal and familial nature of the work. Haq often works in community and collaboration, enriching the artworks themselves, and bringing the poetics of process and communal making to the fore as a gift and methodology.
Social Practice
The artist has a strong social practice. She is dedicated to doing meaningful work on each of the territories where the exhibition is welcomed. Haq strongly believes in making deep connections with South Asian community members, IBPoC communities, youth and women. Haq works to build relationships with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers to bring the work onto the territories in a good way and to foster true inter-cultural sharing through relationship building and cultural exchange.
Photo credit: Dale Klippenstein, The Reach Gallery, exhibition opening. Truck Gallery, Calgary, AB. documentation, Photo credit: Mike Tan, Marc Kitteringham
Exhibition Catalogue
I am my mother’s daughter is accompanied by a thoughtfully composed and designed catalogue made in partnership with the Art Gallery of Hamilton. It is a dual language – Urdu and English, 60 page, fabric bound, full colour exploration of the project and Farheen Haq’s practice and processes. It includes written pieces by Haema Sivanesan and Jenelle Pasiechnik, ghazals composed by Farheen Haq and Sheniz Janmohamed, process and documentation images.
Farheen Haq
Farheen Haq, she/they (b. 1977) is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who lives and works on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən Territory. She was born and raised on Haudenosanee territory (Niagara region, Ontario) amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her multidisciplinary practice which often employs video, installation and performance is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Farheen’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Canadian territories, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time. www.farheenhaq.com
Farheen Haq performing Rasam: Hamara Badan at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2023.
She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally including New York, Toronto, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. Recent solo exhibitions include I am my mother’s daughter at The Reach Gallery (2024), Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023), Campbell River Art Gallery (2022), Sentirse en Casa at Casa Cultura Gallery, Medellin Colombia (2018), Being Home at the Comox Valley Art Gallery (2015). Group exhibitions include Fashionality at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2012), Collected Resonance at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2011), The Emperor’s New Clothes at the Talwar Gallery, New York (2009), and Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Miami (2008). Farheen received her BA in International Development (1998) from the University of Toronto, her BEd (2000) from the University of Ottawa and her MFA in Visual Arts (2005) from York University. In 2014, Farheen was nominated for Canada’s pre-eminent Sobey Art Award.
Interested?
The Campbell River Art Gallery is seeking expressions of interest from public art galleries and artist run centres in the form of support letters to include in a Canada Council for the Arts Circulation and Touring grant that will be submitted in October of 2024. Please contact Jenelle Pasiechnik, Curator of Contemporary Art with any additional questions or information requests.
The Campbell River Art Gallery plans to submit grant requests to the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council with the support of institutions that express interest in presenting the exhibition, I am my mother’s daughter. Contingent upon these financial supports, we hope to be able to cover the full cost for transporting the artworks as well as the expenses related to the artist’s sojourn.
Booking Information
Jenelle Pasiechnik
curator@crartgallery.ca
Curator of Contemporary Art
Campbell River Art Gallery
250-287-2261