Even With Sharp Teeth You Can’t Bite Water
Artist:
Nura Ali
Dates:
January 26 – March 15, 2024
Location:
A/P Main Gallery
Even With Sharp Teeth You Can’t Bite Water is an exhibition of new works investigating The Diasporic Imaginary and the complications of self-fashioning while still in the midst of grappling with a fraught inheritance. The print works presented as part of this solo exhibition use abstraction and fragmentation as entry points to meditate on the spatialisation of diasporic consciousness and the utility of remaining within spaces of opacity, unknowability and in betweenness. Through their avoidance of closure, the works create an opening for re-spatializing the pluralistic, multi-directional and multi-temporal scope of diasporic identity. With open linear geometries and unfixed topographies the prints utilise a sort of pragmatic ambiguity to foreground the slippery nature of witnessing, the entangled relationship between place and placelessness and the fugitive, emancipatory potential of a diasporic imaginary where belonging is allowed to exist not as an either/or, but rather, as an all at once.
Nura Ali is a visual artist, writer and curator, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. She received a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a BA in English Literature, Art History and Italian from the University of Leicester and a BA in History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her wide-ranging practise investigates the linguistic and cognitive scaffolding underpinning the ways we create meaning. Nura has shown her work across Canada and internationally, received numerous awards and grants; most recently from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Arts Canada Institute, Calgary Arts Development and the Rozse Foundation and has taken part in various national and international residencies. When she is not curled up with a book or pottering around her garden, Nura is dreaming up ways to dismantle oppressive structures and for this reason became one of the founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union; a unionised workers cooperative whose mission it is to transform labour practises in the arts sector and create fair, equitable and sustainable working conditions for artists and cultural workers.
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