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Islamic Art in Contemporary Canada: Nadia Kurd on BlackFlash’s Infinities Issue

The front cover of a magazine in solid light-baby blue with an image at the center. Title of the magazine “BlackFlash” is in white letters in a plain, bold font. Image at the center has a white foreground and has Palestinian embroidery in the top left corner with threads extending from the edge of the piece. Embroidery has floral patterns in red and dark blue with some orange accents. The piece is by Palestinian artist Samar Hejazi
BlackFlash Issue 38.3 “Infinities” featuring Samar Hejazi’s Little Blue-six (2021) from The Intricacies of Wholeness series


Canadian arts magazine, BlackFlash, has long been platforming the diverse and divergent in visual contemporary art. In its latest issue for Fall/Winter 2021, Infinities (38.3), it focuses on Islamic art, defined loosely, generously and inclusively; applied to everything from Instagram posts to ceramics to Microsoft Word, as a medium. The issue represents an important moment in the history of Muslims living in Canada, which understands them as part of the art scene, but also seeks to highlight how many immigrant Muslims are also taking accountability as settlers living on colonized land; the essays and artists in the issue question their relationship to the land and their responsibilities to its Indigenous peoples, as well as other systems of oppression such as anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. Infinities even looks beyond Canada and includes on its front cover an image of Palestinian tatreez by artist Samar Hejazi, which, as a medium, by sheer means of its existence, is a stand against Israeli settler-colonialism.

One of the reasons the Hazine team was so excited to highlight BlackFlash was that the prospect of an Islamic arts issue of BlackFlash was novel: documenting such a project is critical to anyone who identifies with Islamic art –Muslim, however that is defined, or non-Muslim alike– and might want to embark on a similar project. The careful curation of BlackFlash 38.3 is due to its guest editor and BlackFlash editorial committee member, Nadia Kurd. She tells us in this interview how this issue came to be, how it fits into BlackFlash’s overall vision, working with writers, and how Infinities might inspire the Canadian art scene. 

All images provided by Nadia Kurd.

You can order a digital or physical copy of Infinities here, read much of the issue online here and enjoy some of the web features related to the issue here. Additionally, Kurd commissioned a series of responses to the issue, which are forthcoming.

At Nadia Kurd’s recommendation, we encourage you to support  the Canadian Council of Muslim Women,  NISA Homes, and the Indian Residential School Survivor Society.

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Translating Mughal Paintings into Scents: An Interview with the Curators of Bagh-e Hind, Bharti Lalwani and Nicolas Roth

Maharana Jagat Singh II celebrating the Festival of Flowers in the Gulab Bari Garden, Raghunath, son of Maluk Chand, 1750, opaque watercolour and gold paint on paper, 49.8 × 41.8 cm (image). Udaipur, Rajasthan

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Accession Number: AS144-1980

The digital exhibition had been introduced to the cultural heritage scene before the pandemic, but since Spring 2020, it’s here to stay, in part because of the accessibility of the form and in part, because increased familiarity with digital curation has allowed students, independent researchers, and others to partake in carefully bringing together objects and pairing them with one another. However, very few, if any, have tackled a digital exhibition exploring scent. That’s the challenge the curators of Bagh-e Hind, Bharti Lalwani and Nicolas Roth, have set themselves. The exhibition explores 17th and 18th century India through both the lens of scent and the garden: each exhibition room is based around either rose, narcissus, smoke, iris, or kewra, featuring not only paintings where the scent is part of what is being communicated, but poetry in translation, other objects related to those scents, and the curators’ notes, so we can follow along behind the scenes.

As  Bagh-e Hind represents the collaboration between an academic and a perfumer (who is also an art critic), it sits nicely at the nexus of the communities Hazine is trying to cater to. Beyond simply documenting the curation of such an exhibition, there’s also something intriguing about the history of olfaction, which is often thought of as elusive: yet, Lalwani and Roth bring together multiple wells of knowledge to allow us to smell the past and challenge our ways of knowing. 

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