
Rihab Essayh: أحلم بواحة ناعمة (Je rêve d’une douce oasis | I dream of a soft oasis)
More interested in building worlds than building installations, Rihab Essayh’s tactile and immersive environments emerge from her efforts to support the conditions for “radical softness” – an idea that suggests that showing emotions and vulnerability is a political gesture in a society that prioritizes intellect and indifference. Evoking the topography of an oasis surrounded by a diaphanous sunset of cotton voile, the Moroccan-born artist layers elements based on their materiality – from her subtle drawings on paper and poems on fibre suspended before and beyond the horizon, to the projected light on fabric and sound that vibrates in the space.
This layering is paralleled in the perspectives she incorporates in her work. Collaborative in impulse, Essayh engages diverse Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) voices in the making of her work, decentring colonial, Eurocentric and Orientalist perspectives. The lightness and delicacy that is the cumulative effect of the constructed landscape speak to her vision of a soft futurism based on principles of empathy, belonging, and care, particularly important in the context of the pandemic and its drastic social and emotional impacts.
Image details: Rihab Essayh, The hymn of the warriors of love, 2022, video: 10:12 mins. Image courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition represents the culmination of two years of focused work in the University of Guelph’s Master of Fine Arts program. The Art Gallery of Guelph’s annual exhibition of a graduating MFA student is presented in conjunction with the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.
View More Exhibitions

exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
Connecting aspects of Indigenous cosmology to wider cultural meanings, this exhibition speaks to the idea of seeing through space.

exhibition
January 19.2023 / May 14.2023
The first exhibition to explore pioneering feminist artist Mary Kelly’s long engagement with activist movements.

exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
Taking root during pandemic lockdowns, this installation acknowledges loss while offering a space for grief and mourning.

exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
This work chronicles the artist’s experience of pregnancy amid reports of high maternal mortality rates experienced by Black women in the U.S.

exhibition
January 19.2023 / May 14.2023
This exhibition speaks to the connections between art and social activism and to the visual aesthetics that emerge from protest.

exhibition
September 14.2022 / December 31.2022
Examining intersections between botanical explorations and colonization, Anahita Norouzi focuses on the plant colloquially referred to as giant hogweed.

exhibition
September 14.2022 / December 31.2022
This exhibition of Haudenosaunee souvenir beadworks responds to the history of ethnographic collecting by celebrating personal, economic, and cultural value.

exhibition
September 14.2022 / December 31.2022
Curated by Middlebrook Prize recipient Erin Szikora, Homecoming engages land, language, and community, offering strategies to rethink our relationships to home.