Contemporary Conversations:
Ghazaleh Avarzamani in conversation with Mona Filip
June 6
2 PM
Dome Theatre
To mark the opening of Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s solo show Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return, please join us for a conversation with the artist and Chief Curator Mona Filip. The conversation will reflect on the central themes of the exhibition, exploring how familiar structures like games, playgrounds and manuals subtly reinforce the rules and power dynamics shaping social and political life. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the public.
Free with registration.
This program is supported by RBC Foundation as part of the Contemporary Conversations Series.
About the Artist
Ghazaleh Avarzamani
(she/her)
Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s research aims research aims to reveal and unsettle the often invisible social hierarchies that govern our lives. Through her practice, she explores the fallacies and inequities in our inherited knowledge and manuals. By creating visual narratives that simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct time and space, she aims to reconfigure materials to highlight dysfunctionality and failure, utilizing collective human memory and knowledge that is often taken for granted. She reveals the extraordinary about the ordinary, and seeks ways to represent the otherwise taken-for-granted.
Avarzamani holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London. Her work has been shown across a wide range of international venues, including Hayward Gallery, Delfina Foundation (London, UK - 2025), Dhaka Art Summit (2023), Aga Khan Museum (2021), MOCA Toronto (2021), Toronto Biennial (2022), Calgary Contemporary (2025), Rockefeller Foundation (2024), and Meet Factory (2023), among others.
Her work is in private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Google, Rockefeller Centre, Arsenal Contemporary, MOCA Toronto, TD Art Collection, and Red Mansion.
About the curator
Mona Filip
(she/her)
Mona Filip (she/her) is Contemporary Calgary’s Chief Curator. Her curatorial career spans two decades of developing critical visual art programs, supporting the production of new works, and introducing national and international artists to new audiences through first local exhibitions. Filip’s projects have explored the intersections of collective memory, place, and belonging, examining artistic strategies that redress sidelined histories, restitution and repair, and storytelling as world-building. Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Filip holds a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington DC, and an MFA from SUNY at Buffalo.
