Ghazaleh Avarzamani. Of Manual, 2026.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani
Of Manual
June 4—November 8, 2026
Exterior Installation
In her layered, multidisciplinary works, Iranian-Canadian artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani examines familiar objects like board games, playgrounds, manuals, and nursery rhymes to uncover the invisible ways in which power dynamics are learned and perpetuated. For Contemporary Calgary’s façade, Avarzamani creates a panoramic image assembling a multitude of tokens and pawns into a cumulative manual where fragments of board-game logic form a single speculative landscape.
Borrowing from the visual language of classic strategy games, the composition incorporates heraldic symbols that evoke national borders, territorial identity, and systems of authority. The board becomes a model of society: a controlled arena where movement is regulated, identities are assigned, and outcomes are shaped by rules that often remain hidden to the player. Viewers are invited to consider the implications of selecting pieces and entering the game, confronting through play the fraught idea of land as possession to be disputed, organised, and governed.
The replicated icons and grids suggest methods of standardisation and obedience, while emblems of warfare, victory, and prestige point to the rewards attached to participation. Merging playful aesthetics with underlining tenors of control, Of Manual reflects on the subtle ways in which entertainment, competition, and territorial governance intersect, lifting the curtain to open possibilities for resistance and undoing.
Curated by Mona Filip. Supported by The City of Calgary’s Downtown In Motion Grant Program.
About the Artist
Ghazaleh Avarzamani (she/her)
Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s research aims at revealing and unsettling 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.
