The ECH is appalled by the ongoing violence, rising tensions, and the devastating loss of life in Palestine and Israel. The toll —particularly on civilians, including women and children — has already been far too great. 
 
Please join us for a conversation with Freda Guttman, Montreal-based artist/activist and  Professor Salah D. Hassan, Director of Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University, Lansing, Michigan on Sunday, May 23 at 4 pm EDT. 

Freda has been a constant voice of solidarity to Palestinian people over a lifetime of activism.  She lives in Montreal and has worked as a printmaker, photographer and  laterally, as an installation artist.

​She has been a longtime supporter of the Embassy Cultural House, participating in the 1984 International Women's Day exhibit, as well as our most recent online IWD exhibit: Go; Rise and Strike in March 2021.

Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and internationally. Guttman has made her art practice and her political activism come together in a series of installations. 

​Among her installations that focus on Palestine/Israel are Diminish Your Cup and Two Family Albums: Canada Park, from 1994 to 2004.  

Join us in solidarity with all those who support a just peace in the Middle East. We are calling for an immediate ceasefire. 
 
As an artist-run project, the ECH condemns the May 15th unjustified ransacking and raid by Israeli Defense Force soldiers on Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art & Research, an independent art centre in Bethlehem. The raid, which destroyed computers and other office equipment, follows the burning of their urban farm earlier in the week. Attacks against cultural centres and other civil society organizations, including the media, are against international law.

The Embassy Cultural House is deeply saddened to learn of the death of the remarkable painter Susanna Heller, who passed away on May 5, 2021.

Many of Susanna’s paintings involved elaborate installations made up of assemblages of smaller paintings on paper and were based on her walks around the city.  Her love of painting and her love of walking were intricately connected. Her sketch books were the notes that reflected her curiosity and intense observation of her surroundings, whether walking around the metropolis of NYC or the cities of Europe.

ECH co-founder Jamelie Hassan first met Susanna in 1984 when they were both living at La Cité internationale des arts in Paris through the Canada Council for the Arts. Jamelie remembers her time with Susanna:

"Over the months that we overlapped, we enjoyed many conversations about culture and numerous wanderings around the city, so conscious of the way the city and its abundant museums and galleries, parks and gardens, kept us outside walking, rather than working inside our respective studios.

"Our group in Paris at the time included my young son Tariq, age 11, Ron Benner, Wyn Geleynse and his daughter Mara, age 11. The Paris Vision ECH tabloid issue from Sept./Oct./ Nov. 1984 records this unusal collection of creative people in dialogue with Susanna over that period.  In 1986, Susanna came to London to present a solo exhibition of her recent works at the Embassy Cultural House. Her connections with the London community of artists, writers and curators deepened at that time.

"Recently, in October 2020, she reconnected with us and the ECH, presenting one of her startling paintings, Eyes in a Bleak World, 2020 for the open call online exhibition Hiding in Plain Sight coordinated by Ron Benner. In her communications to us she expressed her pleasure to be involved with our reinvigorated collective.

Susanna was an inspiring artist, a generous colleague, and a warm and supportive friend. Her death leaves an enormous gap in the arts community both in Canada and the United States, where she had made her home and studio in Brooklyn, NYC."
 
Here is a revealing conversation from Feb. 6, 2020 with her longtime friend Medrie MacPhee that conveys the genuine spirit, humour, intelligence and beauty of our friend and artist Susanna. May she rest in peace. Her website is  online here.

​We are pleased to welcome Michelle Wilson as our newest contributing editor to the Embassy Cultural House.
 
Michelle Wilson is an artist and mother of French/British descent. In her current work she makes palpable the presence and absence of bison, as well as their inseparability from the land and its people. In the Euro-American archive, bison bodies have been used to convey colonial knowledge systems, and their story of survival has been used to perpetuate myths of 'settler saviours.'

This is the legacy that Wilson, as a feminist of settler descent, studying in colonial institutions, has inherited and is confronting. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario.
 
She is participating in the GardenShip & State project curated by Jeff Thomas and Patrick Mahon which will be presented in September 2021 at Museum London. An in-progress version of Michelle's multi-media (non-linear) dissertation can be viewed here.

​Michelle is one of the exhibiting artists and a contributing editor assisting in the coordination with the upcoming Earth Day 2021: Stop Extinction! Restore the Earth online exhibit live April 22, 2021. She also participated in the International Women's Day Exhibit: Go; Rise and Strike.  Michelle’s new role as a contributing editor will strengthen the ECH’s already strong community partnership with Gardenship and State. 

We are ​pleased to welcome Niloufar Salimi as our newest contributing editor to the Embassy Cultural House.
 
Niloufar is a visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  She primarily uses drawing and minimal mixed media to form a narrative between certainty and ambiguity.  Salimi completed her MFA at Western University and received a BFA from OCAD University.
 
Salimi is a multiple recipient of Ontario Arts Council Grants. She currently resides in Toronto. In addition to her studio practice, she works as a Gallery Assistant and Teaching Artist at the Power Plant Contemporary Gallery.
 
Niloufar is one of the artists exhibiting and also assisting in the coordination with the upcoming Earth Day 2021: Stop Extinction! Restore the Earth online exhibit live April 22, 2021. She also participated in the International Women's Day Exhibit: Go; Rise and Strike. 

The South African newspaper, Sowetan Live, published an article on March 12 on JUNO Award-winner Lorrain Klaasen as part of its International Women's Day coverage. Lorraine, the daughter of the legendary South African performer Thandi Klaasen, remembered all the powerful women who contributed to making her the person she is today.  The article also reported on the sold-out Embassy Cultural House online event held on February 13, 2021  to celebrate Lorraine's 2020 Forest City London Music Award (FCLMA) in the category of World Music.  ECH Co-Founder, Jamelie Hassan, is quoted in the article as describing Lorraine as a strong advocate and powerful voice for women across the globe.  Lorraine recently joined the Advisory Circle of the  ECH to help promote education and awareness of African music, culture and heritage. Read the article online here.

​Congratulations on the Embassy Cultural House’s excellent show, which Jade Williamson coordinated and organized with Ruth Skinner and Charlotte Egan and brought together for International Women’s Day.

It is a modulated exhibition, reflecting a fine spectrum of works of art by the many artists who contributed to it. The exhibit is at once accessible and public while being insightful and reflective, intellectual and social. 

Sometimes there is objective intimacy; other times there is subjective revelation.

The presentation allows each artist to represent herself, while the sequence of the show flows smoothly and comes together as a collective work. The virtual images’ scale and portions of each work of art are well developed and presented with accompanying commentary and/or description by the artists.

It is good to scroll through the entire collection of pieces to observe the differences and complimentary relations of each artist’s work to one another, to feel the impact of the historical pieces, by many of the women artists such as Shelley Niro, Bernice Vincent, Freda Guttman, and Mireya Folch-Serra, who have made a significant contribution, relative to the new works by numerous younger artists, Niloufar Salimi, Julie René de Cotret and Soheila Esfahani. 

There’s texture to the works ranging from startling with elements of recognition and reversal in perception over to intimacy with a slow emergence of a revelation. 
 
Marwan Hassan, a novelist of Arab descent, was born in London, Ontario in 1950. He is a graduate of the University of Windsor. Marwan now lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

The Embassy Cultural House (ECH) is pleased to announce that Lorraine Klaasen is joining our Advisory Circle. Lorraine is an internationally renown performer, a JUNO award-winner, and received in 2020 the Forest City London Music Award  (FCLMA) in the category of World Music. Originally from South Africa and formerly living in Montreal, Lorraine now lives in London, Ontario.

Lorraine has dedicated her career to uniting people of all races through music and art. Since immigrating to Canada about four decades ago, Lorraine has recorded and performed around the world. She has given memorable performances at the Montreal Jazz Festival and Carnegie Hall. Her 2013 ‘Tribute to Miriam Makeba’ CD (Justin Time Records) earned her a JUNO Award. She participated in a documentary called the ‘Legends of Madiba’ that pays tribute to prominent South African female singers.

On February 13, 2021, the ECH hosted an online celebration in recognition of Lorraine's FCLMA World Music Award to a sold out crowd, and we are very excited to have Lorraine join our team bringing her energy and ideas to our ECH community.
 
Other members of the ECH Advisory Circle include: Samer Abdelnour, Wyn Geleynse, Fern Helfand, S F Ho,  Judith Rodger, Ruth Skinner and Lucas Stenning. 

Sylvie passed away on October 8, 2020. As many of us know, Sylvie was (it feels strange to write about her in the past tense) a respected artist and a committed educator. But for me, she was a friend. I’ve known her for 20 years, so my memory might be less than accurate but this is how I remember meeting her for the first time at her exhibition at YYZ in Toronto. I went to the gallery to introduce myself as I had recently found out that I had been accepted into the MFA program at the University of Windsor where she was teaching. I knew her work, spent time reading about her installations but had never seen her work in person. I am a shy person. So instead of talking to anyone, I stayed in a darkened room with her work Le regard du silence. The work was so quiet. I felt I may disturb the image if I were to walk around. I sat and watched the slow turning page in the projected image as the face in the video slowly dissolves and disappears. I was so moved by her work, I decided to be courageous and ask her to be on my committee. Many years later she told me how she made the work to look so natural, which I won’t reveal because there was a little trick to it. She was always ingenious when it came to solving problems.

Working with Sylvie could be painstakingly intense, but this is how I learned that there is no problem that can’t be solved. When I was helping her with Fragments d’une histoire, we went around collecting the “perfect” fallen red maple leaves in the park. This was only the beginning of her pursuing to make the video with leaves falling as natural as possible. It was a contradicted effort to mimic nature through recording leaves falling in a studio. But in the end, she found the way to make it work. Similar to the steady slowness in Le regard du silence, the leaves fell in her video with ease, paired with the slow stride of Didier walking into the forest on the other side of the work. The calming pace in her work is effortless; at the same time, it is perfectly measured.   

We hung out a lot at her Toronto studio. Many times, I would stay late into the evening because our conversations often went on for an indefinite time. Rick always made wonderful meals. It was a given that there would be an extra plate for me at their dinner table. Over the years, she taught me many things. One of them is her love for animals, particularly dogs. She was always with her dogs, all the way to the end. She taught her classes with her dog next to her. We often joked about how Dismal (her Poodle) was our TA. I think my love of dogs solidified because of her, and now they are and will always be in my life. Sylvie was undeniably generous with her time, sharing of knowledge and ideas; she was honestly critical; she was overwhelmingly filled with empathy; she was passionate, especially towards art. She wanted to talk about art and her new project to the very end. 

So, I was wrong. She was never just a friend. She was and always will be an artist I admire and a mentor I love and respect. I am honoured that she was a part of my life. I think the only way to end this tribute is with her own words. Thank you, Sylvie and I will miss you. We all will.

“Art is social because it resuscitates again and again, fears, desires, hopes, anxieties, beliefs and the struggle of being at once in relationships to each other and in a world that has its own relationships. 

"L’art est social parce qu’il ressuscite constamment: craintes, désires, inquiétudes, convictions ainsi que la lutte du fait d’être en relation avec les autres et en même temps d’être dans un monde qui a ses propres relations”.                                                                                                      Sylvie Bélanger, 1985

June Pak, October 13, 2020, Toronto

Sylvie Bélanger's work is represented by Birch Contemporary You can read her full obituary here. 

​Jamelie Hassan will be part of a Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) discussion panel on Cultural Suppression and Revival on Saturday September 26, 2020.  The panel will explore the silencing of Palestinians voices in the cultural sector, as well as showcasing artists reviving Palestinian culture in their work.

 “I am honoured to add my voice to such a distinguished panel and be together with those who stand in solidarity with Palestine and culture here in Canada and across communities internationally. TPFF is inspiring and full of surprises... it's introduction of kid-friendly programs -  its intergenerational dynamic that appeals to all audiences  - grandparents, moms and dads and everyone else, drawn together from Toronto's BIPOC, cultural workers, activists, secular and civil society communities, keen to discover what's new and urgent in Palestinian culture."

-- Jamelie Hassan, London, Ontario

Please visit the TPFF online program for a full listing of films and events. ​