21 Wade ave, unit 2, toronto

What we Carry | July 12 - September 6, 2025

Artists: Ousmane Bâ, Surabhi Ghosh, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Baseera Khan, Luciano Maia.

What We Carry explores how identity is not fixed but continually shaped —stitched together from memory, inheritance, and the tactile presence of materials. Through abstraction, layering, surface, and spatial composition, each work becomes a site where identity is constructed not as a singular truth, but as a process formed through encounter, gesture, repetition, and time.

Patterns, textures, and mythologies are called upon not to define, but to unfix and unravel the illusion of a stable self and to challenge inherited structures of meaning. The material itself becomes both subject and medium: fabric, pigment, paper, and form are used to carry stories that are often felt more than told. These works invite us to consider how knowledge moves not through language alone, but through ritual, through repetition, through the quiet memory of touch.

The body, whether present, implied, or absent, anchors these investigations. It becomes both container and transmitter, absorbing cultural codes and reflecting personal, political, and spiritual histories. Across the exhibition, viewers move between what is kept and what is transformed, what is known and what resists naming.

Rather than offering identity as something to be resolved, the works gathered here affirm its multiplicity. They evoke a sense of lineage without prescription, and of transformation without finality. In this space, identity is not a destination, but a passage: an ongoing practice of assembling, unmaking, and remaking.

Ousmane Bâ is a French visual artist, born and raised in Strasbourg where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from L’Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués. His practice mainly centres around drawing, painting and collage. Bâ always took an interest in Japanese art and moved to Japan in 2017 to develop his style and technique, immersing himself into a new philosophy and vision of the world. He works mostly with ink, inspired by the art of calligraphy as well as the techniques of Japanese printmaking, including, among others, the « Moku Hanga » technique (wood print). Ousmane Bâ has since participated in exhibitions in various Japanese galleries such as Studio Gross, Fukagawa garage and Trunk Hotel. Most recently, his work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Lausanne, London, and Dakar (2024), following his participation in the Dakar Biennale (2022).

Surabhi Ghosh is an artist and educator based in Montréal. She is Associate Professor of Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University and is also the current Chair of the Department of Studio Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Using repetitive processes and site-responsive installations, Ghosh exploits the tensions and imperfections in handmade textile patterns to give material and spatial form to cyclical narratives of pride and shame. Recent solo and duo exhibitions have been at Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto), Maison des arts de Laval, Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown), Hawthorn Contemporary (Milwaukee, WI), and Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Gund Gallery (Gambier, OH), Stewart Hall Art Gallery (Pointe-Claire, QC), and the South Asia Institute (Chicago). She also curated a virtual exhibition for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal titled Intranarration, viewable online from 2023-2027.

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka is a Japanese-Canadian artist based in Toronto. Her practice brings together historical craft technologies of her heritage including ink, natural dye, printmaking and papermaking. Her work is experience based and includes long-term community-engaged projects with collaborators in the high Arctic as well as recent collaborative performances that integrate and reinterpret kamiko, garments sewn out of washi, Japanese paper. Her work carries forward the beauty and possibilities of environmentally sustainable traditions into the future. Her approach to wearable sculpture removes the boundaries between craft, fashion and art. Hatanaka’s intentional choice of materiality supports the concepts embedded in her work which includes interconnectedness and impacts of globalization on communities integrally grounded in specific lands and collapsing time to layer ancestry and past versions of self. Hatanaka has exhibited her work at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, CA), The British Museum (London, UK), Toronto Biennial of Art (Toronto, CA) the Guanlan International Printmaking Base (Shenzhen, China), Nikkei National Museum (Burnaby, CA) and Harper’s (New York, USA).

Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist interested in materials, color, and their economies. The effects of these relationships to labor and family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being allows Khan to work within multiple genres. From public art installation to sculpture, painting to performance and music, Khan hasmounted several solo exhibitions in the past years sharing a diverse body of work.Their public art commission for The High Line Park in New York City, Painful ArcII, Shoulder High, was installed from 2023-24 by the Standard Hotel. Khan mounted a few museum solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. 2023, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York 2021-22, and mounted a solo tour-ing exhibition for Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio 2022-2023. Recently, Khan is preparing for their first solo exhibition in London at Niru Ratnam Gallery, a public art commissioned by Help USA, and a group exhibition with Paul Robeson Gallery at Rutgers University (2025). They had solo exhibitions at Simone Subal Gallery in New York City and 10 & Zero Uno in Venice, Italy in 2024.

Luciano Maia is a visual artist and surface designer born in Santarém, Pará, Brazil.He holds a degree from Universidade Cândido Mendes (Rio de Janeiro) and works across painting, collage, ceramics, and illustration. His practice exploresthemes of memory, belonging, and personal mythology through hybrid visual narratives that bring together enchanted figures, reinvented landscapes, and cultural symbols from Northern Brazil in compositions that move between the dreamlike and the critical. Since 2020, Maia has been developing a body of work that reconstructs emotional memories through symbols drawn from Amazonian imagination and experiences of displacement. He has participated in group shows and art salons including Galeria 25M (São Paulo), the Vinhedo and Ubatuba Art Salons, and the Levino Fanzeres Salon (Espírito Santo), where he received second place. In 2024, he presents his first solo exhibition at Paço das Artes (São Paulo) and joins group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad.