Colossal featured Esther Elia on 3 November ahead of Bazaar Ashuraya at Hecho a Mano in Santa Fe, running from 6 to 29 November. Her work approaches contemporary Assyrian experience through painting, patterns and objects.
This helps keep culture from being confined to the past tense. A domestic object is interesting because it’s used alongside other things: yesterday’s purchases, inheritances, chance finds. Those neighbours don’t necessarily cancel its meaning. Sometimes they show that a tradition is still participating in life.
For designers, there’s a useful question about authenticity here. Are we preserving a living connection, or making an image in which everything matches a little too neatly? Real homes rarely achieve a perfect exhibition plan. But they can accommodate memory, a new taste and a chair whose origin nobody remembers, all at once. That incompatibility isn’t yet a reason to call a curator.
