**Jayce Salloum.** *swimming through, the cosmos, light the darkness,* what do the fish know ’cause we don’t, koi, Syilx territory (Kasugai Gardens, aka Kelowna, BC), 7/7/21 [20210727_113145], (detail), 2021.

Presence: A Timely Exhibition on Placemaking and Community
Opens at Contemporary Calgary

Calgary, Alta (June 24, 2025) - Contemporary Calgary is pleased to announce Presence, a group exhibition exploring the themes of placemaking and community through the work of seven leading contemporary artists. Opening on June 26, 2025, the exhibition arrives at a moment of global reckoning with displacement, identity, and the reshaping of civic life. Media are invited to attend the opening reception on Thursday, June 26, between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. or book interviews by appointment with the Senior Curator, Kanika Anand, at Contemporary Calgary (701 11 Street Southwest). Please email nikita@parkerpr.ca

Curated by Kanika Anand, Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary, Presence features work by Abbas Akhavan, Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal, Christine Howard Sandoval, Jayce Salloum, Linda Sormin, and Badlands Art Department x Lindsay Sutton. With practices rooted in storytelling, social engagement, diasporic memory, and material experimentation, these artists explore space not as neutral or static, but as a socio-temporal construct—continually produced, contested, and transformed.

“Presence began as an exploration into what makes a community, and is an invitation to think about how we share and inhabit space. The material language of the exhibition unfolds through lived journeys- to places of personal history and memory, places of conflict and erasure, places of play, learning and resilience. By weaving origin stories and oral traditions with those of games and gathering, the exhibition is about finding balance in a time defined by absolute binaries,” says Kanika Anand, Senior Curator of Contemporary Calgary.

Composed of research-based practices that include documentary photography and film, textile, ceramic and paper sculpture, drawing and installation, Presence reflects the evolving definitions of community and collectivity. While Abbas Akhavan’s work engages with social legacies that shape the boundaries between domesticated and wild, hostile and hospitable, Jayce Salloum’s work reads like that of an itinerant geographer of conflicted territories. Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s practice explores games and play as tools to understand power dynamics and systemic

structures. Linda Sormin and Christine Howard Sandoval’s work reflects on the knowledge embedded in oral histories, archives, and collective memory, while Lindsay Sutton’s quilted textiles and Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal’s paper pulp sculptures carry the spirit of the land to become objects of personal growth and resilience.

The exhibition foregrounds lived and embodied experiences, encouraging viewers to trace, explore, and expand the ways we think about space and community. Thinking of indoor and outdoor space, as well as geological space, Presence expands its own presentation to the Riverwalk by the Bow River with an audio walk by Abbas Akhavan, and into the Dome Theatre with a site-specific installation by Linda Sormin that engages the theater’s history as Calgary’s planetarium with sound, video, and constellations of lit images drawn from divination texts.

Learn more about Presence: www.contemporarycalgary.com/whats-on/presence

View images here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/12DPpc5UHWq9SH3demGtzrPDXNcnxhso-

Presence: A Timely Exhibition on Placemaking and Community Opens at Contemporary Calgary