Looking for Freedom questions the impact gender-based trauma has on the mind and body through self-portraiture—addressing themes related to identity, selective memory and cultural amnesia. In their images, artists Daphne Boxill, Negar Pooya and Sora Salima Kouaci share methods for working through the impacts of different manifestations of trauma. Pooya sees home as a safe place from negative outside associations—using photography and painting to create a vessel of collective identity. Boxill uses ghostly fabric cyanotypes and dance as an imagination of freedom from racial, intergenerational, internalized misogynistic traumas that weigh on her body. Kouaci reflects on colonial trauma—using photography to reflect multiple realities and the duality of her identity—to describe the complex and multifaceted process that manifests itself through physical, psychological and social symptoms. Through various approaches, Looking for Freedom invites viewers to speculate what freedom from trauma might look like.
Through her self-portraiture, Daphne Boxill investigates her relationship with solitude and the emotions that arise from it. As her own subject in front of the camera, she explores what it means to be vulnerable, reflective, curious and also joyful and empowered. Her inspiration comes from many places including her childhood, nature, poetry and mythology. Boxill works and lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Negar Pooya has a completed BFA in painting with honours and a completed MFA with honours on a full scholarship. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose works engage a range of media including photography, painting, printmaking, and digital art. As a woman artist, she combines her personal experiences and emotional reactions with her knowledge of art to create a communicating language. Light, emotion, and her background as a painter play a massive role in Pooya’s photography. Over the past few years, she has focused on themes addressing humanity, identity, the environment, and nature.
Salima Sora Kouaci is a contemporary interdisciplinary visual artist currently based in Mississauga. She is conducting research at York Glendon College in Toronto, focusing on the relationship between literature and imagery related to the Algerian War. Combining material and textual research, her practice unfolds through photography, collage, and archival materials. Bridging themes of colonialism, postcolonialism, immigration, and colonial trauma. Her work offers alternative perspectives surrounding the colonial gaze, ethnic, soft violence, or symbolic violence (power of language), representation, and collective experience. She employs methods of subversion and reclamation as tools to resist imperialist legacies.
