Khadija Baker
Khadija Baker is a Syrian Kurdish 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 Stewart Hall Art Gallery. Education. Born in Amûdê, Rojava, Baker moved to Montreal in 2001 and has a degree in fine arts from Concordia University. Career. Her work combines sculpture, sound, textiles, and video and is inspired by her lived experience of trauma and forced displacement. Baker uses 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. In 2015, she collaborated with photographer Henderen Chalak, dancer Fethi Karakecili, and painter Dara Aram for a display at the Toronto's Cedar Ridge Gallery that explored the nature of Kurdish identity. In 2018, the Stewart Hall  Art Gallery hosted her "Trajectoires" exhibition that she created with artists Lysette Yoselevitz and Dorothée Nowak. The exhibition was also later featured at the Maison de la culture Mercier. 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 in 2022.