Dadi’s work on display at the Art Gallery of Windsor

Art department chair Iftikhar Dadi and his wife Elizabeth Dadi collaborated as part of a group exhibition titled Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land) currently on display at the Art Gallery of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Their installation, Efflorescence, is a series “inspired by the strangeness of this attribution,” according to Iftikhar Dadi. The word efflorescence denotes blooming— the rapid flowering of a culture or a civilization, and the sense of glowing and being lit, but also, negatively, the manifestation of a stain or discoloration.

The neon series of four flowers focuses on the concept of nation-states and how they ascribe symbols exclusive to themselves in order to characterize their singularity. Flowers become specific national symbols even as they grow over a wide geographic range. As markers of national identity, they become contested botanicals.

Border Cultures is a three-part exhibition that brings together artists working in the region, nationally and internationally, to examine the complex and shifting notions of national boundaries through contemporary art practice. The exhibition is on display through March 31, 2013 and is curated by Srimoyee Mitra.