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Image Credits: Courtesy of the artist.

Main Gallery

Shifting Borders

Artist

Insoon Ha

Exhibition Dates:

September 8, 2025

- November 21, 2025

Opening Reception:

September 12, 2025 7:00 pm

Shifting Borders presents photographic installations and sculptural works that explore the “frame” as both boundary and metaphor for social and political categorization.

The photographic works feature fragmented portraits, divided and displayed across multiple frames. Viewers are invited to reconstruct the figure, reflecting on identity, perception, and the fractured ways we are seen and understood. The sculptural works, built from deconstructed frame corners with band saw blades embedded inside, form new structures where rupture and tension coexist with the possibility of transformation.

As the daughter of displaced people and a minority artist, I resist neat categorization and instead embrace contradiction and layered identity. Shifting Borders reimagines the frame not as confinement but as a site of complexity, renewal, and becoming.
Artist Biography:

Insoon Ha’s work explores colonialism, hybridity, and the abject through installations that invite reflection and challenge assumptions. Drawing on her own and shared histories, she examines how identity, power, and violence intertwine. 

Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Art Gallery of Guelph; the Whanki Museum in Seoul, Korea; La Centrale Gallery in Montreal; Latitude 53 in Edmonton; CEPA Gallery in Buffalo; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto; A Space Gallery in Toronto; the McMaster Museum of Art; and the Albright-Knox Museum; Art Galley of Mississauga.

Insoon’s practice has been supported by numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. Her achievements include participation in residencies such as The Studios at MASS MoCA, the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, the Banff Centre Leighton Artist Studio Residency, the Sculpture Center in New York City, and the Foundry Residency in Montreal.

Find more of her work online at insoonha.ca.

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