Image: Mercer Union, Toronto
The exhibition is Akhbari’s first institutional solo exhibition in Canada.
Developed over five years of fieldwork and archival research, ‘Of Wool and Diesel’ is a new commission. The work considers border landscapes and their entanglements with seafaring histories, set along the International North–South Transport Corridor. Its subject is the smuggling of sheep from the Caspian littoral around Astara, Azerbaijan, through the Strait of Hormuz to the port of Khasab, Oman.
The work centres minor figures along this journey, including a shepherd, a smuggler, a historian, an underwriter and a pair of lovers. Their stories unfold through survival and risk, desire and longing.
The production was filmed in Portugal, Oman, Iran and Azerbaijan and is described as Akhbari’s first major international production. ‘Of Wool and Diesel’ is commissioned by Mercer Union in Toronto, the Toronto Biennial of Art, HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística in Lisbon and the National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement Initiative.
Mercer Union organizes the exhibition, which is co-presented with the Toronto Biennial of Art. Akhbari is an artist, filmmaker and geographer based in Toronto and Lisbon whose practice works across film and installation to investigate the political and ecological entanglements of trade, infrastructure and human geography.
