# Khadija Baker

Khadija Baker is a Syrian Kurdish and Canadian artist and performer who lives in Montreal.
Her multimedia work reflects her own experiences of forced displacement and trauma and has been shown globally including at the Atassi Foundation at Alserkal, Dubai, the 3rd Istanbul International Triennial, Istanbul, Turkey; the 6th DocuAsia Forum, Vancouver, Canada; the 12th International Exile Film Festival, Gothenburg, Sweden; the 27th Instant Video festival, Marseille, France; the inaugural Syria Contemporary Art Fair, Beirut, Lebanon; the 17th CONTACT Photo Festival, Toronto, Canada; the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; the 6th OFTTA festival, Montréal, Canada; the 10th International Diaspora Film Festival, Toronto, Canada; Alwan gallery New York, USA; and the official exhibition marking Damascus’ role as the 2008 UNESCO Arab Capital of Culture, Damascus, Syria – as well as well as group shows in Vienna, Austria; Paris, France; Berlin, Germany; Delhi, India; Beirut, Lebanon; London, UK; New York and San Francisco, USA. She also showed locally at A Space Gallery, Gallery 101, M.A.I (Montreal, arts interculturels), Karash-Masson Gallery, Stewart Hall Art Gallery.

## Education

Born in Amûdê, Rojava, Baker grew up in a small village near the Syria/Iraq border. She received a Master's in Interior Design from Damascus University in 1999. She moved to Montreal in 2001 and holds a BFA in Studio Arts and an MFA Open Media degree in fine arts from Concordia University.

## Career

Baker's work combines sculpture, sound, textiles, and video and is inspired by her lived experience of trauma and forced displacement. She frequently makes use of her body as a way to encourage intimacy with her audience, such as her performance My Little Voice Can't Lie where members of the public are encouraged to touch her hair to access speakers woven into it. Baker also uses her art to critique the treatment of Kurds in Syria.
She has won funding awards from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
She has exhibited locally and international including her 2009 Coffin Nest exhibition in Damascus about Iraq's mass graves, at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, as well as in Amsterdam, Beirut, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Marseille, Montreal, New York City, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Seoul, and Tokyo. Baker is a member of TASHT collective, which was created 2016, collective originally come from the Middle East. Hourig is Armenian, but born in Lebanon; Khadija is Kurdish from Syria; Shahrzad is Iranian; and Kumru is Kurdish hailing from Turkey. Having lived in volatile regions before calling Canada home, all four women have inherited memories of atrocities from their families, just as they have all lived through civil wars, military coups, bloody revolutions, and political repressions. It is these inherited and difficult lived memories that compose the fabric of their individual interdisciplinary work and the broader canvas of our collective work together.
Baker's solo exhibition, Unravelling Empire, was presented at A Space Gallery in 2011. It featured works that address forced migration and maternity. The work Home/Skin again featured the artist's own hair.
In 2018, the Stewart Hall Art Gallery hosted the Trajectoires exhibition that she created with artists Lysette Yoselevitz and Dorothée Nowak. This exhibit touched on the immigration stories of many people, including the effects of the artists' own history on their artistic production. It was first created and presented at Espace projet in 2016 and later featured at the Maison de la culture Mercier. Baker's work was also featured in the exhibition Grieving Empire presented at A Space Gallery in 2017, which explored the violent repercussions of imperialism and settler colonialism.
In 2020, Baker was Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts Award winner.
Her Birds Crossing Borders multimedia piece featuring Muzna Dureid, and two other anonymous Syrian women, was exhibited at the Salle de diffusion de Parc-Extension and Montreal, arts interculturels (MAI) in 2022.