Between Rupture and Renewal: Memory, Resilience, and the Poetics of Transformation.
Roya Khadjavi is proud to present Aida Izadpanah, Farzaneh Ghadyanloo, Farsad Labbauf, Safarani Sisters and Sepideh Sales. What does it mean to survive—not simply to endure, but to be transformed by the forces that threaten to undo us? The five artists in this presentation explore the space between rupture and renewal, where fragility and strength become inseparable. Across painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, video, and resin, their works consider memory, displacement, resilience, and the continual act of becoming.
Farzaneh Ghadyanloo explores transformation through translucent resin works in which human, animal, and botanical forms dissolve into one another. In Luminous Atlas and Choreography of Collapse, vulnerability becomes movement, suggesting that survival is not a return to what was, but an ongoing state of change.
Farsad Labbauf turns to cultural memory, fragmentation, and belonging. Through stitched and deconstructed imagery, familiar symbols collide with maps, corporate icons, and popular culture. His works hold rupture and wholeness in tension, questioning the stability of the images and narratives through which identity is constructed.
Aida Izadpanah gives resilience material form. Her layered paintings and porcelain elements emerge from and beyond the canvas, balancing delicacy with strength. Drawing from Persian gardens, floral motifs, and abstraction, her work presents resilience as something luminous—formed through, rather than in the absence of, hardship.
The Safarani Sisters investigate the shifting architecture of memory through painting, video, and performance. Their layered works blur past and present, sorrow and celebration, reflecting on the ways nostalgia reshapes experience and transforms loss into a space for renewal.
Sepideh Salehi explores memory, displacement, and belonging through painting, photography, video, and embroidery. Combining personal imagery with Iranian visual traditions, she treats memory as fluid and continually rewritten by distance, longing, and time.
Together, these artists resist simple resolution. Their practices span generations, materials, and geographies, yet converge around a shared understanding: fragility is not weakness, rupture is not an ending, and transformation can itself become a form of resilience.
Art Toronto: Metro Toronto Convention Centre, North Building
October 29 – November 1, 2026