June 26 - November 9, 2025
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal, Jayce Salloum, Christine Howard Sandoval, Abbas Akhavan, Badlands Art Residency x Lindsay Sutton, Linda Sormin
Curated by Kanika Ananda, a site-specific instalation by Linda Sormin is now on view in the planetariam dome at Contemporary Calgary. Presence is an exhibition about the ways we occupy and organize space, and the role it plays in shaping our sense of community. What makes a space hospitable for some more than others, and how do we find our place within space?
The work, A sky not meant to be read, by Sormin includes recorded voices of her relatives around family dinner tables on the West and East coasts of North America, then layered in fragments of origin myths of Batak Indonesia, and those drawn within her own familial storytelling. The artist has integrated videos of handcut watercolour paintings and sculptural ceramics process within her own multidisciplinary practice. The line drawings that emerge represent traditional ritual objects found within the artist's research - offering an emotional connection to experiences that continue to operate beyond spoken language and recognizable visuals.
Drawing on the understanding of space as a socio-temporal construct, artists are invited to reflect on space as it is continually produced, contested and transformed. The exhibition is rooted in ideas of placemaking that centers community and networks of collective enterprise as cultural infrastructures in themselves, and is a gathering of projects and artworks that contemplates the evolving definitions of community and collectivity.
The group show Presence is a window into a larger ecosystem of practices that emphasizes and empowers the ordinary or commonplace. It reflects the ways we are present in the spaces we inhabit. While focusing on lived and embodied experiences, storytelling and popular practices, the artists invite us to journey with them, to trace, explore and expand the ways we think of communities.
