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UID:28492-0@www.visitcalgary.com
DTSTAMP:20260610T180107Z
DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20260604T120000
RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;UNTIL=20261108T180000Z
SUMMARY:Ghazaleh Avarzamani: Churn\, Earn\, Burn and then Return
DESCRIPTION:Examining familiar objects and settings — playgrounds\, board
  games\, sport arenas — Ghazaleh Avarzamani traces the subtle architectur
 es through which power is learned\, rehearsed and maintained. What appears 
 playful or ordinary reveals itself as something more insistent: a hostile c
 horeography of rules\, conquests and defeats insidiously shaping social and
  political life. Beneath the surface of games\, manuals\, fables\, and educ
 ational references in Avarzamani’s works lie the economic\, psychological
  and ideological structures that govern the ways in which people belong to 
 society.\n\nAvarzamani’s installations unfold as spaces that are at once 
 seductive and destabilizing. Familiar forms return altered\, carrying a qui
 et sense of unease. Nursery rhymes\, games and instructions no longer funct
 ion as benign cultural expressions\, but as mechanisms through which societ
 ies naturalize obedience\, hierarchy and collective fantasy. Poetic\, sarca
 stic and politically incisive\, her work attends to the paradoxes embedded 
 within educational methodologies\, exposing how systems of control often ap
 pear in the language of entertainment\, participation and progress.\n\nChur
 n\, Earn\, Burn and then Return extends this inquiry through a seemingly pl
 ayful environment comprising sculptures\, textiles\, illustrative images\, 
 text\, found and archival objects. Yet in this new installation\, inspired 
 by the Monopoly game\, the stakes gradually emerge as more sombre. Cycles o
 f labour\, accumulation\, exhaustion and repetition move through the space 
 like rules of a game already in motion before the viewer arrives. Throughou
 t the exhibition\, each game token operates as an allegory of hierarchy\, a
 ssigning value\, status and movement. The familiar riding horse is replaced
  with a sardonic reference to the representation of the Prince of Wales and
  his horse at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925\, where Canada famously
  presented a life-size butter sculpture of the royal in celebration of impe
 rial power\, directly linking the logic of Monopoly to the spectacle of ter
 ritorial expansion\, extraction and the gamification of ownership. Butter r
 ecurs throughout the exhibition as both material and metaphor: tied equally
  to the labour of churning and the volatility of churning markets\, where i
 nstability\, excess and collapse remain in constant circulation.\n\nAt a mo
 ment marked by large-scale political and economic shifts that often leave i
 ndividuals feeling powerless\, Avarzamani’s practice insists on the inher
 ent possibilities of recognition. By making visible the systems that quietl
 y organize daily life\, her work opens a space for critical attention\, dis
 ruption and refusal.\n\nCurated by Mona Filip.\n\nhttps://www.visitcalgary.
 com/events/ghazaleh-avarzamani-churn-earn-burn-and-then-return-2\n\nhttps:/
 /www.contemporarycalgary.com/whats-on/ghazaleh-avarzamani-churn-earn-burn-a
 nd-then-return
LOCATION:Contemporary Calgary\, 701 11 Street Southwest\, Calgary\, Ab\, T2
 P 2C4
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