Mirror, Mirror
"Mirror, Mirror", 2000
Installation: two dressing tables with stools, miscellaneous objects
Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster  © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)



" [...] I trace and explore my own identity as I delve into societal rituals that deal with intimate, and often taboo, body issues.

" Mirror, Mirror" is a piece that explores outer identity-the facade that we put on to face the world. I find that the facade I choose to wear depends on the society I mingle in. " Mirror, Mirror" exposes the identities that are within me. [...]

I purposely left the mirror frame empty to show the flow from one side to the other."


Excerpts from the artist's statement




Of Yemeni ancestry, Laila Binbrek was born in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1970. She spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia and her adolescence in Egypt, and then lived in England, where she attended the Blackheath School of Art and the Portsmouth College of Art. On returning to Canada, she earned a Bachelor's degree in visual arts from the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, and attended a post-graduate program at the Dundas Valley School of Art. She now lives in Toronto. When I say that I am going home to see my family, this can be in Kitchener or in the Middle East. One or the other. "Going home" does not have an established, definitive meaning for me.

Laila Binbrek
Laila Binbrek, Kitchener, Ontario, 2000
Rawi Hage
Gelatine silver prints
Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization


The question of identity plays a preponderant role in her work, its centrality reflected by the position that the body occupies both as a point of reference and as a place where social relationships are articulated: When people look at my work, they find themselves in unfamiliar territory. Something has been displaced [...]. One can see that there is a parallel here, a link with my own experience of displacement. Always fragmented, dispersed, captured in its traces (body hair, earwax), its functions (elimination, reproduction) and the rituals of grooming and hygiene, the body is evoked through drawings, models and objects (bathtubs, combs . . . ) organized within the framework of installations: That the nude body is judged "obscene," the sexual organs "offensive," menstrual blood "dirty," shows how a society perceives itself.

Mirror, Mirror
"Mirror, Mirror" (detail), 2000
Installation: two dressing tables with stools, miscellaneous objects
Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster  © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)


Another central theme, allied with that of the body, permeates Laila Binbrek's work, and that is the place occupied by women in Western and Eastern societies: There are different ways to interpret my work. Knowing where I come from opens the door to other meanings, to other ways of looking at my work.

Laila Binbrek's work has been exhibited primarily in Ontario galleries, in solo and group exhibitions.