ZAHRA KOMEYLIAN
RED SOUP (2024)
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
water over marsh
in Only Reliable Narrators, a group exhibition curated by Miles RufeldsThe Plumb, presented by 2022 Contact Photo Festival, May - June 2022, Toronto
with Jenna Bliss, Jennifer Laiwint, Erdem Taşdelen and Andrew Davis
Only Reliable Narrators contemplates the critical ways that narratives and stories work to structure collective ideas of truth, history, power, science, self, and hope. In the artists’ works, fictitious personae, imaginary archetypes, and speculative histories guide audiences towards familiar, affective truths, while factual records and normative myths break down under the demands of their presumed authority. The works employ a range of experimental narrative strategies, alternately playing with the line between fact and fiction, and interrogating the norms governing the distinction at its base.
Komeylian’s contribution to the exhibition, Water over Marsh (2022) looks to water as an equalizing plane for interlocution between archive and speculative imaginings. Reconciling histories of genealogical erasure, political tumult and melancholy in the post-colonial body, Water over Marsh attempts demarcations on a liquid ground as the only stable place for holding these tensions. Intended as an assemblage, this work actively grapples with the ‘failure to frame’, through acts of obscuring, parsing, and unraveling narrative residues, implicating the visitor in the work of signification, or meaning-making.
An exhibition print with an essay by Mel Mikhail and index of works can be found here.
With thanks to the Ontario Arts Council.