Artist and Educator Maryam Hafizirad invites Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing visitors to engage with the artworks through visual storytelling, ASL, gesture, body language, memory, and shared discussion. Each session will include a short introduction to De’VIA (Deaf View/Image Art), followed by guided storytelling and discussion.
The sessions will be built around water as a central metaphor for Deaf life, drawing on ideas of flow, depth, current, and resilience to explore Deaf identity, memory, and lived experience. This metaphor offers a visual and embodied throughline that connects to the biennial theme Things Fall Apart, and to guided storytelling prompts around access, identity, rupture, language, resistance, visibility, and community.
Inquiries at learning@torontobiennial.org.
De’VIA Storytelling with Maryam Hafizirad is made possible in partnership with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and OCAD University.
October 17, November 14, December 12
2:00pm – 3:00pm
Artist Bio
Maryam Hafizirad
Maryam Hafizirad is an international award-winning multidisciplinary Deaf Canadian Persian visual artist, working across painting, sculpture and design. She is an art curator, teacher, mentor, and advocate for Deaf artists. A graduate of Isfahan University of Fine Arts (2002), her exhibitions have been featured in Iran, China, Germany, Malaysia, India, Canada, and the United States. Maryam’s Persian classical early works were dark in subject and colour, with women’s faces and bodies forbidden. When she moved to Malaysia and settled in Canada (2011), her work transformed. She began painting using Persian and Deaf View Image Art (De’VIA) metaphors with strong contrasting colours, textures, and incorporating Deaf experience and values. Pomegranates were symbols of hidden love released, fish in water represented sincere human beings in her silent world of pure visual beauty, and birds embodied her newfound freedom as a Deaf woman in this new country. Maryam is Deaf curator for the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf and on faculty of the national Deaf Arts Academy, Deaf Arts Retreat Centre, Grande-Digue, New Brunswick.
Partners
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Art Museum at the University of Toronto - University of Toronto Art Centre
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