Reyhan Yazdani // Debris of a Mother Tongue
Date:
Fri, Sep 18th, 2026 to Fri, Oct 30th, 2026Time:
11:00 am to 6:00 pm
Description:
Reyhan Yazdani’s first solo exhibition in Kelowna, Debris of a Mother Tongue brings together handmade and painted paper, pastel sculptures, and digitally fabricated objects within an imaginary archaeological site to explore the ecology of language.
The exhibition is part of a longer research and creation project in which Reyhan Yazdani engages with a collection of words and figures drawn from museum archives to consider diaspora, displacement, and the ways histories are collected, carried, and fragmented.
“In Farsi, a tomato is called gojeh farangi—literally, a foreign berry. When my child voices the word gojeh farangi to ask for it, we both encounter a form of rupture: one geographical, the other generational.”
Throughout the exhibition, Yazdani approaches familial and linguistic fragments as points of entry into questions of inheritance, place, and terrestrial belonging. Fragments, absences, and half-remembered words and images become a vocabulary for thinking through diaspora and displacement, where meaning is held as much in what is missing as in what remains.
The exhibition’s title, Debris of a Mother Tongue, borrows from fellow Iranian artist Gelare Khoshgozaran’s Royal Debris (2022), drawing from their attention to ruin as a condition of displacement to consider what remains of language when home, body, and mother tongue no longer occupy the same place.
Conceptually and formally, the exhibition moves through three interconnected conditions: Mother, Child, and In-Between. Its material language emerges through handmade pastel and paper, alongside gestures associated with childhood—tracing through stencils, assembling scattered pieces, repeating forms, and working through touch. These processes become sites of exchange between generations and bodies, where forms, materials, words, and gestures are passed back and forth, carried from one body to another, and altered along the way.
The works inhabit the gallery space between rupture and continuation, where language and the body carry traces of what has been inherited, displaced, and transformed. Maternal and speculative forms emerge from this fragmented landscape, approaching rupture not only as a condition of loss, but as a space from which new forms, meanings, and relations can emerge.
Venue:
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
Address:421 Cawston Ave #103, Kelowna
Cost:
Ticketing and/or registration:
Click here for full event detailsFor more info:
Ph: (250) 868-2298
Email: info@alternatorcentre.com
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