By Joan Janzen
joanjanzen@yahoo.com

Leader & District Arts Council is hosting an exhibition of ten portraits painted by Madhu Kumar from Regina. The portraits will be on display at the Town of Leader Office weekdays until April 23. It is the first exhibit to take place in over a year, and the Arts Council members are excited to welcome Leader and area residents to participate in a tour.

Kumar’s portraits entitled “The Stories of Immigrant Women” relay true stories through large-scale oil paintings, text and audio. Kumar can personally relate to those stories, as she immigrated to Canada from India in 2001. Empathy for their struggles and challenges inspired her to capture their experiences on canvas. She began by contacting women through the Immigrant Women Centre in Regina.

One of the portraits reveals the story of a woman who came to Canada from Iran. When she was eleven years old, her parents forced her to marry a 35-year-old man. When she discovered she was pregnant at age thirteen, she cried and cried, but her mother insisted that she would help her take care of the baby.

Later, her husband began using drugs and kicked her out of the house. She and her two children moved in with her parents, and she got a divorce and custody of the children. She applied at the UN for Canadian citizenship but was told it would take four years before they could help her.

Her father was pressuring her to agree to another arranged marriage. Since she refused, she was forced to move out of her parent’s home. Fortunately, she met a rich Iranian woman. When the woman heard her sad story, she gave her a job cleaning her home and a room to rent.

Two years later, she received a call from the UN and moved to Canada in 2011. Now she has a job, driver’s license and her children are planning to go to university.
Hannah, who is captured in a portrait, tells her story of growing up in Vietnam under a communist regime. Her father sent eight of his young children off on to crowded boats into the China Sea in hopes of having a brighter but uncertain future. A captain of a British oil rig rescued Hannah and the 81 other people on the boat and offered them a new life. But before that happened, she spent six months in a refugee camp in Thailand, where there was the constant threat of rats and Thai pirates. After six months, she was granted a visa to live in England, where she excelled in school and received a scholarship to university. After she married, she and her husband moved to Canada.

Women in the remaining portraits came to Canada from Bosnia, Mexico, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Uganda, Syria and Eritrea. Through means of an app on your phone, you can listen to each woman tell her personal story, as she appears in the same setting and attire as in her portrait.

According to Brooke Clary, the visual arts coordinator for Leader, after April 23, the exhibit will move on to numerous other locations throughout Saskatchewan.