Image: Contemporary Calgary, Calgary
Contemporary Calgary is presenting Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s ‘Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return’ as an exterior installation running June 4 to November 8, 2026. The work appears in tandem with ‘Of Manual’, another Avarzamani installation on the gallery’s façade, extending a project that uses the visual language of games, manuals and everyday objects to examine how power is learned and reproduced.
According to Contemporary Calgary’s exhibition text, ‘Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return’ is installed in the Ring Gallery and Atrium. The gallery describes the work as examining familiar settings such as playgrounds, board games and sport arenas, tracing “the subtle architectures through which power is learned, rehearsed and maintained.” What may first read as playful is framed as a system of rules, conquests and defeats that shape social and political life. The installation incorporates sculptures, textiles, illustrative images, text, found objects and archival materials.
Avarzamani’s broader inquiry in the project is tied to board-game logic, especially Monopoly. Contemporary Calgary says the installation treats each game token as an allegory of hierarchy, assigning value, status and movement. In the gallery’s description, the familiar riding horse is replaced with a reference to the Prince of Wales and his horse at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925, a detail the institution links to Canada’s presentation of a life-size butter sculpture in celebration of imperial power. Butter appears in the work both as material and metaphor, associated with labour, churn and the volatility of markets.
The exterior work ‘Of Manual’ takes a different formal route while returning to the same concerns. Contemporary Calgary says Avarzamani creates a panoramic image for the façade, assembling “a multitude of tokens and pawns into a cumulative manual where fragments of board-game logic form a single speculative landscape.” The composition borrows from classic strategy games and includes heraldic symbols that evoke national borders, territorial identity and systems of authority. The gallery writes that the board becomes a model of society, one in which movement is regulated, identities are assigned and outcomes are shaped by hidden rules.
The institution’s text also emphasizes how the installation links entertainment and governance. Replicated icons and grids suggest standardisation and obedience, while emblems of warfare, victory and prestige point to the rewards attached to participation. ‘Of Manual’ is described as reflecting on “the subtle ways in which entertainment, competition, and territorial governance intersect,” and it is supported by The City of Calgary’s Downtown In Motion Grant Program. Curator Mona Filip is credited with the presentation.
Contemporary Calgary’s August public-programs listing places both Avarzamani works among a larger summer schedule that includes exhibitions by Adelita Husni Bey, Haig Aivazian, Erdem Taşdelen, and Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens. The gallery notes that ‘Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return’ and ‘Of Manual’ are both on view through November 8, 2026, alongside the other current exhibitions. For Avarzamani, whose practice the gallery says focuses on revealing invisible social hierarchies and inherited systems of knowledge, the Calgary presentation aligns a façade work with an interior installation in a single, extended examination of power and play.
