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I Almost Didn’t Feel You Leave

 

Sophie Sabet

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Bradley Museum, Mississauga
May 11 – June 15, 2019
 

Concepts of home circulate widely and often predictably. Sophie Sabet’s immersive installation takes a more personal and honest approach to understanding how it is that we might contend with ‘home’ as both place and feeling. Her autobiographical work intimately traces the complexities of her Iranian-Canadian home, a space that bears witness to the weight of displacement and cultural frictions. This solo exhibition brings together Sabet’s videos, still images and sculptural works. Through these quiet and subtle portraits Sabet traces the contradictory, difficult and sometimes painful ways that her family navigates their identity and diasporic realities.

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Exhibited within Mississauga’s Bradley House, Sabet’s works aim to disrupt the staged historic site. Layering a contemporary and difficult image of home onto that of a simulated, 1830s domestic space, encourages a different reading of the house museum. This alternative reading might ask that we look more deeply at the mechanisms of display employed by museums and how these strategies can inadvertently de-politicize what is inherently political.

 

This exhibition received The Gattuso Prize which acknowledges an outstanding Featured Exhibition in the CONTACT Photography Festival. The jury based their decision on the conceptual and technical excellence of the work, as well as the curatorial vision.