ZAHRA KOMEYLIAN
WATER OVER MARSH (2022)
TWO PASSAGES (2021)
RECIPES FOR RADICAL REST AND SLOWNESS (2020)
GROUNDWORK (2020)
NOTHING IS A HOLE IN ITS OWN SKIN (2020)
CONTAINER FOR A PRECARIOUS RECORD (2019) PLACES WHERE THINGS HAD BEEN PUT BECAUSE THEY HAD BEEN VIOLENTLY DISPLACED, AND PLACES WHERE THINGS FOUND THEIR NATURAL GROUND AND STABILITY (2018- 2019)
ABOUT/ CV
GROUNDWORK:
A performance-feast to celebrate the harvest of Ishtar's International Network of Feral Gardens
Zahra Komeylian and Ayumi Goto in collaboration
Presented by SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), Toronto,
October 2020 
Zahra Komeylian and Ayumi Goto’s ongoing performance-based collaboration explores slow and quieter methodologies of engaging artistic practice. Using food-making and food-sharing as both material practice and mode of inquiry, their performance interventions and research is concerned with the politics and potentialities of radical care, and care-work.
As their first performance in collaboration, Komeylian and Goto develop recipes culminating from excursions, readings and shared meals in the forest spanning spring-summer 2020.
Grounded in the gesture of ‘reaching toward’ one another, and in an amalgamation of shared food knowledges, Komeylian and Goto developed a performative five-course distant forest feast with harvests from Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens.
This performance-feast for 25 took aimed to approach the topics of care, activism, and community-sharing by way of collective contemplation and of these topics throughout the meal. Quotes from A Culture of Place by Bell Hooks, Light in the Dark by Gloria Gloria Anzaldúa, and Meditation on Beauty by Bahar Orang were folded into various courses of the feast and read collectively.
The feast, which took place on the cusp of Toronto’s Phase-2 COVID lockdown, occurred on October 09, 2020.
SAVAC’s feral garden
performance-mapping
Left-over jar of chilli from pot prepared for City Hall camp-out against Toronto Police violence and systemic racism, June 2020