Franz Kaka is proud to present Athar / a Sending, a solo exhibition by Montréal-based Ayam Yaldo, presented in partnership with Images Festival 2023.
In Athar / a Sending, Yaldo collapses time and place to unearth historical and personal memories that have otherwise been dispersed, displaced or disembodied. Centring the form of the bowl or basket as a carrier and container for ancient traditions and cultural knowledge, Yaldo’s artefacts populate the site of an imagined archaeological dig where fragments of forgotten narratives are excavated, examined and catalogued.
In the projected installation Ascend (2023), a ladder appears just out of reach in a digitally rendered space that spills across the floor and wall of the gallery. Interrupted by an array of archeological tools, studio materials, utilitarian objects and ceramic sculptures, the scene oscillates between mythological and real, ephemeral and physical, lost and found. Accompanied by a suite of looping single channel videos and relief sculptures, Yaldo’s Athar / a Sending is in constant movement, shifting and evading fixed values and narratives while instead inhabiting a multiplicity of times and places, as well as the varied and contingent identities these might give rise to.
Ayam Yaldo (b. 1985 Baghdad, Iraq) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Masters degree in Studio Arts in the department of Intermedia from Concordia University. Yaldo is a laureate of the 2023-2026 Darling Foundry Montreal Studios Program.
Working in a wide range of media including video, performance, voice and storytelling, ceramics and installation, Ayam Yaldo explores narratives that shift between the personal and the political, the past and present, reality and myth. Her research is concerned with the formation of the self and subjectivity, and how these take shape in relation to grand historical narratives, place and memory. Focusing on the body, identity and image, Yaldo utilizes tools for world building through concepts of reconstruction, transformation and ephemerality, in relation to forms of displacement.