Jamelie Hassan: Provocation

Museum Of Contemporary Canadian Art Dept: Hassan, born in London, Ont., to Lebanese parents, has bumped up against the challenges, perils and occasional joys of being from here, but also there, all of her life. The character, noon, is a chapter heading in the Qu ran, which, in this era of unmatched paranoia regarding the Islamic faith, is almost impossible to read as anything less than a provocation. It s as a good a starting point as any to Hassan s fraught politicality and parsing of the immigrant experience in small-city Canada, according to The Star. The blunt provocation of Noon , made in 2009, is one of the latter: more a dare than an invitation to understanding. Take the dare and, inside, you re greeted with Al Jazeera/Prisoner 245 , another glaring neon work Hassan crafted in 2008 as a critique of several western nations, Canada included, refusing to carry the Arabic-language news network. The piece reads, in Arabic, I b a shoom, which translates to shame on you, shaped and curled into a likeness of the Al Jazeera logo; the shame also extends to the detention of one of the network s cameramen at Guantanamo Bay for more than six years and at the entrance to At the Far Edge of Words, the 30-plus year survey of the work of Jamelie Hassan at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, a crisp Arabic character glows in chilly blue-white neon against a backdrop of glossy black tile. It s not inviting, and maybe that s the point. Indeed, Hassan s life and artistic output are run through with a sense of otherness. The exhibition, which opens with a splashy fete Sept. 7, uses a poem by the Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish as a sort of spirit guide. Its title is telling: I Am From There. Hassan, though, is acutely aware that she is also from here , and the hybridity of her perspective and experience both gives her workforce and occasionally reduces it to one-note scolding. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.