Exhibition: Opacity Dress by Laïla Mestari

Laïla Mestari’s interdisciplinary approach examines how North African identity persists and mutates through artistic and craft practices, despite multiple attempts at colonial assimilation and the mass emigration of its recent diasporas. Drawing on the symbolic charge of objects from her family history, the artist rearranges both Maghrebian and Québécois cultural baggage to create new hybrid assemblages. At the center of the exhibition is Opacity dress, a sculpture in the shape of a djellaba, the traditional garment of the Maghreb, which seems to float in the Petite Galerie, completely uncluttered, subtly evoking the fragile yet persistent presence of a diasporic culture in the face of the forces of erasure.