Exhibition
Debris of a Mother Tongue: #2 Bombs
Artist
Reyhan Yazdani
Dates
November 13-22-2026
EXHIBITION/EVENT DETAILS:
Artist: Reyhan Yazdani
Exhibition Title: Debris of a Mother Tongue: #2 Bombs
Exhibition Dates + hours:
Exhibition Location: salishan place by the river, (pop space off lobby) 23430 Mavis Ave, Langley Twp, BC V1M 2S2
Opening Reception: Friday, November 13th, 6-8pm
Hands-on workshop: Sunday, November 15th. 1-3pm
Artist Talk and Tour: Sunday, November 22nd. 2-3pm
Exhibition Opening hours:
Opening: Friday, November 13 – 6-9pm
November 14-22 – 9-5pm
November 8-11: By appointment only, contact fortgalleryarc@gmail.com to book.
Website: fortgallery.ca
Exhibition Text by Dana Qaddah
BIO
Reyhan Yazdani (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people. Her research-driven work migrates between a range of media including handmade paper, objects, social invitations, and creative writing to engage with ontological, material and spatial inquiries on themes of exile, displacement, and diasporic approaches to care and belonging.
Yazdani holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran. Her practice has been supported through grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council, alongside exhibitions and artist residencies across Canada. Her work has been presented at Kelowna Art Gallery, Seymour Art Gallery, Two Rivers Gallery, Open Studio, and Centre A, with recent and upcoming residencies including Nomadisms at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2026) and Fondazione Officine Saffi in Milan (2027). Yazdani is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Check out more of Reyhan’s work on her Instagram.
ARTIST STATEMENT
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.
ABOUT EXHIBITION
Debris of a Mother Tongue: #2 Bombs
Fort Gallery, Langley
In its second iteration at Fort Gallery, Debris of a Mother Tongue: #2 Bombs brings together handmade pigmented paper, works on paper, and oil pastel sculptures to explore the ecology of language, displacement, and the relationship between body and land.
Building on the first exhibition, this chapter introduces new works on paper responding to the current global political landscape, marked by conflict, destruction, and displacement, and the difficulty of finding words for the fear, grief, and uncertainty experienced from a distance. Against a pale sky-blue background, dark sculptural forms inhabit a fragmented landscape, suggesting the tension between vulnerability, destruction, and what remains.
And workshop:
Gathering Debris: A Drawing Workshop with Oil Pastels
In connection with Debris of a Mother Tongue: #2 Bombs, this hands-on workshop explores drawing as a way of recording, reflecting on, and archiving landscapes, rupture, and distance. Using oil pastels on paper, participants will experiment with layering, tracing, and mark-making to consider how materials carry traces of body, memory and place. No previous drawing experience is required and all materials will be provided.
