In blue: a momentary assembly of the absent, the impossible, and the hopeful

July 23 – August 31, 2024

Reyhan Yazdani’s first solo show in Vancouver considers the displacement of objects and people, the legacies of dispossession and the generational, geographical and terrestrial experiences of loss and yearning. Through creative processes of transformation, reorientation, replication, and modification, Yazdani thinks through museum archives of objects, images and narratives – often visited with limited online access.

In this body of work presented at Seymour Art Gallery, Yazdani engages with an online archive of folios from the Shahnama (Book of Kings) by Abu’l Qasim Firdausi (Iranian, Paj ca. 940/41–1020 Tus) in possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This manuscript, created in Tabriz, Iran, dates back to 1530 and has been migrated and exchanged between more than ten ownerships as a gift. In interacting with these uprooted materials, Yazdani prompts questions such as: What happens to landscapes and geographies that have been excavated of their generational and cultural heritage? What do displaced bodies – of objects and people – have in common, and what does their interaction look like in diaspora? Who gets to be preserved and cared for and who is left behind?

Yazdani is curious about the generative space of recalibration. Her work aims to articulate the stretching of time and space that shapes displacement as an embodied experience of simultaneity, ambiguity, and wonder while mediating between the historical and contemporary.