Nadia Belerique at 72 Perth

Nadia Belerique, working in photography, sculpture, and installation, expands on photographic strategies of framing, aperture, depth, and the distance between objects and their representations. Her works commonly address tenuous relationships between insides and outsides, private and public, exposed and contained. Collaging and piecing together found objects, photographs, and stained glass, she layers their intrinsic histories and functions to transform them into something else entirely.

Nadia’s architectural installation HOLDINGS (2020–ongoing) incorporates industrially produced, milky-white plastic barrels made to economically send cargo across seas. These barrels were often used by the artist’s family and community in Toronto to ship food, goods, and gifts to and from their relatives located in the archipelago of the Azores in Portugal. As the barrels are continually reused, they bear traces of the substances that they carried previously and remind us of their potential for future use and reuse, as well as our desire to preserve and contain. In HOLDINGS, each barrel becomes a frame or vessel for compositions of liquids, photographs, and object assemblages outfitted with lens-like stained-glass coverings. The translucency of the glass and barrels produces a porous wall through which Nadia’s objects can be looked at and through, the shifting light and shadows changing their compositions throughout the day.

When the barrels arrive in Toronto for the 2022 iteration of this commission, they will have been presented in different forms in Germany, the Azores, and New York before returning to the artist’s place of residence. As water flows from one point to another, the movement and migration of people, animals, and microbial life, as well as ideas, beliefs, and perspectives travel with them. HOLDINGS considers the movement of goods as a constitutive part of migration, tethering people and places across oceans and land. Nadia’s materials, alternating between transparency and opacity, industrial and domestic, speak of relations maintained and troubled by distance, desire, memory, and forgetting.

Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art with the generous support of the RBC Emerging Canadian Artist Program, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Women Leading Initiative, and Daniel Faria Gallery.

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