Spectral Futures

Featuring works by Shirin Fahimi and Jawa El Khash
Curated by Vince Rozario

February 22 – March 30, 2024
Reception: Thursday, February 22, 2024 | 6-9PM

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Spectral Futures is an exhibition that brings together the digital media practices of Jawa El Khash and Shirin Fahimi, which confront the absence of queer, feminist and otherwise marginalized narratives within dominant histories. Fahimi and El Khash deploy speculative fiction as a way of imagining new worlds beyond the confines of patriarchy, colonialism, and environmental destruction.

Adapting texts, objects, and architecture, Spectral Futures finds new ways to animate cultural memory, creating simulations that can incubate a vision for collective liberation.

Fahimi’s project, “Umm Al Raml’s Sand Narratives”, engages Iranian women who practice mysticism, using geomantic divination to speculate on lost histories of women prophets excluded from orthodox theologies. Meanwhile, in “Upper Side of the Sky”, El Khash reimagines ancient ruins and plant life lost to civil war in Palmyra, Syria inviting viewers into the process of bringing them back to life.
Using immersive image-making technologies like interactive 3D animation, holography, and video installation, Spectral Futures salvages from the cumulative wreckage of history to visualize possibilities of life outside of destructive and unsustainable structures.

Supported by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts

Documentation by: Jack McCombe

Video Link

CBC Article