Le Dernier des Touristes

Gallery 101, Saturday, June 11, 2022 to Saturday, July 16, 2022

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman and Laurena Finéus

Le Dernier des touristes is titled after a poem by Haitian author, Kettly Mars. In her poem, Mars describes the tourist gaze and its constant search for an ‘’authentic’’ exotic experience, as she observes foreigners trying to wander into the darkest of slums looking to validate the prejudices of their conception of the ‘’third world’’.

In this exhibition, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman and Laurena Finéus counter preconceived touristic notions of exoticism and danger attached to their Haitian and Somali-Indian cultural and ethnic identities. By taking the standpoint of an ‘oppositional gaze’, as coined by bell hooks, the Black figures shown in their compositions are neither othered nor marginalized, but in power. The unapologetic use of Black figurative imaginings commands space, gaze, and narratives.

To the artists, a ‘tourist’ is an outsider who has yet to understand the essence of the communities in which they arrive. Each work explores their communities’ essences as diverse points of ‘contact’ between north and south, western and other, seen throughout the combined communal histories of Somalia, India and Haiti. Compositionally, the essences meet with third-spaces in the foreground, layering the artists’ third-culture lived experiences as children of immigrants in the Black-Canadian diaspora.

Le Dernier des touristes demonstrates rich, multifaceted perspectives through visual storytelling, re-working of historical events, and personal familial archives, deepening understandings of what it means to be honestly rooted in Haitian and Somali-Indian identity and history in so-called Canada.