“When I was eight years old, my father wrote a play foreseeing my mother and I’s imminent emigration. In this Fish Hooked Runaway / ماھ ِی گریختھ با قلاب entitled, play (2003), an immigrant father goes to visit his young child but the mother is not home, and so father and daughter end up having an exchange from either side of a locked door. The artworks exhibited in Carrying Distance draw inspiration from the play and poem as well as their parallels in baba and I’s experiences as a father and child living with geographical, cultural, linguistic, generational, and gendered distances.”

Carrying Distance is an exhibition of two curtains, a fabric one coloured with natural dyes and a ceramic one composed of thousands of handmade beads. Artist Abedar Kamgari reimagines curtains as symbolic manifestations of sites where multiple distances converge. By engaging embodied, tactile, and labour-intensive making processes, she reflects on contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora. Her curtains gesture to borders shaped by geographical, cultural, linguistic, temporal, and gendered distances.

This body of work is inspired by the set of a play written by the artist’s father, but where the long, white curtain described in the play passively frames the edges of a stage, Kamgari’s colourful and intricate reinterpretations come alive as central figures themselves. In addition to the play, she draws from wide-ranging influences in Persian poetry, feminist writings, archeological monuments, and colonial histories to grapple with distances both personal and global. The artworks in Carrying Distance ruminate on what it means to inherit diasporic families and colonial ruins.

Carrying Distance was on display in the Main Gallery from September 17, 2022 to November 5, 2022.