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Digital Guide: Soheila Esfahani: ARE WE T[HERE] YET?

Digital Guide: Soheila Esfahani: ARE WE T[HERE] YET?

July 17, 2025 – September 21, 2025

ARE WE T[HERE] YET?  asks whether stories can ever truly be finished, or if they are always in a process of retelling, reinventing, and reinterpretation. This exhibition doesn’t ask the viewer to identify what is “real,” but instead invites reflection: How does meaning form? Is it in the object? The touch? The story? Or simply the gaze?

Imagine a love story told a hundred years ago, in a land far from here, within a culture unfamiliar to your own. That story inspires the creation of a handmade bowl, a carved ornament, a painted plate, or perhaps a ceramic bird. Over time, the story fades, but the object remains. Or maybe just part of the lone bird survives the shard with a painted flower. 

That fragment travels. It is copied, collected, and reimagined. It enters new hands and new places, adopted by other cultures who reinterpret its form for beauty, for curiosity, or for commerce. Its meaning drifts. Eventually, its origin may become unclear or even forgotten. We see this in blue-and-white ceramics replicated across centuries, or floral motifs that pass between continents, shifting in meaning as they move.

Soheila Esfahani’s work explores this transformation. Being there and here.
ARE WE T[HERE] YET? brings together ceramic birds, painted plates, and sculptural elements some handmade, others factory-produced or collected over time. These objects occupy a space between authenticity and adaptation, challenging our impulse to trace things back to a singular, fixed origin.

As an Iranian Canadian artist based in Waterloo, Ontario, Esfahani investigates how cultural forms change through translation, migration, and reproduction. Her practice draws on both handmade and mass-produced objects, placing them in conversation to examine how meaning is shaped and reshaped.

Esfahani’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), and the Canadian Museum of Immigration (Halifax), and is held in collections such as the Canada Council Art Bank. She currently teaches at Western University and is a member of Toronto’s Red Head Gallery.

Curated by Niku Koochak

Portable Culture: Mallards & Reeds

2021, acrylic paint and laser etching on wood

This artwork explores how people feel about belonging and where they come from. Soheila Esfahani uses souvenir objects things people collect when they travel and covers them with a special pattern taken from a famous mosque in Isfahan, Iran. By adding this design, she gives new meaning to each object and connects it to her cultural roots.

The work talks about being “in between” feeling like you belong in two places at once, but not fully in either. It shows how people can feel both connected and disconnected at the same time.

A line of poetry by Rumi, a famous Persian poet, helps explain this feeling: “My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.”

Mapping of a Quest

2008, acrylic on Mylar

This artwork is inspired by Persian poetry and the idea of searching. It was influenced by a line from Rumi: “What is not to be found is my desire.” The piece explores the feeling of something being there and not there at the same time like the balance between presence and absence, or between language and shapes.

It begins with the Persian writing of the poem, but the words slowly turn into layers of patterns. Writing becomes more like movement and design. Some words are still visible, while others fade into thin lines that look like maps or hand-stitched fabric.

These lines and shapes act like a visual map of a spiritual journey a search for something hard to explain. As the words disappear, the texture takes over. The front and back of the image seem to change places, forming a maze-like space.

Cut-out shapes, empty spaces, and soft shadows give the viewer the freedom to find their own meaning. There is no one clear path. Instead, the viewer is invited to explore and simply be part of the search.

The Immigrants: Art Windsor-Essex

2017-ongoing, Hand-made & collected porcelain birds. 210 birds in total, 50 birds at AWE

These ceramic birds look at how patterns, shapes, and objects like birds made from porcelain can carry culture with them as they move from place to place. Many of these birds come from souvenir shops or flea markets, where things are often sold far away from where they were made.

The artist, Soheila Esfahani, shows how cultural items such as blue-and-white ceramics or paisley designs travel around the world. When they do, their meaning can change. People from different places see them in new ways or use them for different reasons.

In this installation, the birds are placed on a pegboard, removed from their original setting. This makes us think about how museums or stores can change the way we see and understand cultural objects.

This is also an interactive artwork. Visitors are invited to reflect on their own stories and memories and imagine what each bird might represent. Everyone sees and feels things differently, so this work reminds us that meaning is never fixed. It’s always changing just like culture itself.

Here & There: Souvenir Plates

Variation on Willow Pattern Birds 1-25. 2019, custom ceramic decals on ceramic plates

This work looks at the famous Willow Pattern, a design first made by a British company in the 1700s that copied the style of Chinese porcelain. Even though the pattern was not originally Chinese, it became very popular and was often sold with a love story: two people in love run away from danger and become birds.

Esfahani looks closely at the two birds that appear in many versions of this pattern. She collects these bird images, showing how they are similar but slightly different in each one. This helps us think about how cultural objects change when they are copied, shared, and used in new ways.

By putting all these bird images together, the artwork asks us to think about how culture is created and passed on. What does it mean when something looks like it belongs to one culture but was invented or changed over time? Variations on Willow Pattern Birds helps us see that the line between what is “real” and what is “made up” is not always clear. It invites us to think about how stories and images move across time and place, taking on new meanings as they go.

Here & There: Souvenir Plates

Here & There: Souvenir plates. 2022, gold lustre and ceramic decals on collected ceramic plates.

This series of plates shows the same image of a moose and a rabbit on each plate. The plates look like traditional blue-and-white souvenir ceramics, which people often collect as symbols of a place or culture.

Even though they all show the same image, the design is not clearly recognizable. Each plate feels familiar but also mysterious. This mix of familiarity and uncertainty invites us to think about how meaning can change over time, and how objects can belong to more than one story or culture.

Here: Moose

2022, laser-cut aluminum, approx. 24 in x 34 in

There: Rabbit

2022, laser-cut aluminum, approx. 24 in x 34 in

Here: Canada Goose

2025, laser-cut aluminum, approx. 24 in x 34 in

There: Elephant-Bird

2025, laser-cut aluminum, approx. 24 in x 34 in

These four artworks look like souvenirs, but they are imaginary ones. They ask questions about where culture comes from, what makes something feel “authentic,” and how identity is shown through objects. The shapes and patterns in these pieces are inspired by Iranian religious and folk art. They include designs from a 16th-century ceremonial object at the Aga Khan Museum and decorations from the Imam Mosque in Isfahan, the artist’s hometown in Iran. The Farsi words “Inja” (Here) and “Anja” (There) are included to reflect feelings of living between two places.

These works are made to look like items in a global souvenir collection like the “Been There” mugs from Starbucks. But instead of simply celebrating places, they question how culture is turned into objects, shared, and sold.

Inspired by the ideas of writer Homi Bhabha, the work explores how identity is mixed and always changing. As objects move between places, they take on new meanings. This is part of what’s called “cultural translation” when the meaning of something shifts across time, space, or language. The artist connects this idea to a verse by the poet Rumi:

I am not from the East
or the West…
My place is placeless,
a trace of the traceless.

Cultured Pallets: Double Door from North Mazandaran, Iran

2023, acrylic and laser-etching on wooden shipping pallets

This work looks at how culture can be shared, changed, and understood in new ways. Soheila Esfahani made this work based on her own life moving between Iran and Canada. She was inspired by the idea that translation doesn’t just copy something but changes it. She also thought about “in-betweenness” a space that is not one place or another, but a mix of both.

In this work, Esfahani used wooden shipping pallets, which are normally used to move things across borders. She decorated them with floral patterns from her culture. These pallets become more than just tools they also carry pieces of her cultural identity.

The patterns are a quiet way to show where she comes from. Because pallets are everyday objects used around the world, they help connect different cultures. Viewers are invited to look closely and find their own meaning in the patterns. This artwork encourages people to think about how culture travels and changes. When you look at it, you step into that “in-between space” and bring your own ideas to what the work might mean.

Peg Column – Curatorial Intervention

This custom-built column is made to invite reflection on cultural translation, memory, and movement.

It asks how the act of turning cultural symbols into display objects might change how we relate to them.

Visitors are invited to engage with the structure by placing coloured pegs in response to a prompt using memory, feeling, and recognition as their guide.

Each peg adds a personal voice to the growing collective reflection this column holds.

About the Artist: Soheila Esfahani

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 across Canada and internationally including at the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto, ON), Canadian Cultural Centre Paris (France), Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, BC), Canadian Museum of Immigration (Halifax, NS) 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.

About the Curator: Niku Koochak

Niku Koochak is a contemporary artist holding an MFA /Visual Arts from the University of Windsor and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Tehran /Faculty of Fine Arts. Her artistic research centers on identity formation and the internal conflicts that arise when navigating different social environments. Through her work, she explores the tension between adapting to diverse societal norms and the contradictions faced as a global citizen. Niku’s practice spans abstract painting and performance art, where she employs unconventional tools like elastic bands and slingshots to create her artworks. She is currently the TD Curatorial Fellow at Art Windsor-Essex.

Thank you to TD for funding this Below the 6 exhibition.

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