Image: Contemporary Calgary, Calgary
Contemporary Calgary is presenting ‘You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light’, a multimedia exhibition by Haig Aivazian that runs through August 16, 2026. The project is shown in the Morris & Ann Dancyger Observatory Gallery and brings together three episodes of Aivazian’s cartoon mini-series ‘You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light’ (2022–ongoing), which the artist has developed around the public administration of light and darkness as a policing tool.
According to the exhibition text, the work takes up the question of who controls light and how darkness can be weaponized. It traces the history of public lighting and presents artificial light not simply as a means of illuminating streets at night, but as a mechanism of governance in which visibility supports surveillance, authority, and the enforcement of social order in public space. The exhibition also positions the night as a realm in which regimes can falter and hierarchies dissolve, even as those conditions remain temporary and vulnerable to reversal.
Aivazian’s installation is built from fragments of found cartoons and animations drawn from a wide range of sources, which have been meticulously redrawn, stitched together, and reanimated in collaboration with a team of animators in Beirut. The source material notes varying degrees of alteration to the original imagery. Within that structure, the exhibition frames night as a ground for upheaval and resistance, a space of refuge and revolution that can also be subject to attempts at colonization and control.
The exhibition connects the street and the nightclub as sites of disruption and draws parallels between dancing and protest as forms of communal resistance. At the same time, it follows the point at which those gestures begin to fail, asking what other cultural forms might be needed to confront oppressive conditions. The final lines of the exhibition text place the viewer at a threshold between collapse and emergence, where prevailing systems are about to give way and new ones have not yet taken shape.
Aivazian’s practice, as described on the gallery site, grapples with the relationship between artificial light, computation, and law. The artist examines how the administration of light and darkness can make and unmake persons while also shaping the material conditions of architecture and geography, and how those spaces are inhabited and moved through by humans, animals, objects, machines, and other strange creatures.
The show is curated by Muriel N. Kahwagi. It is one of several Contemporary Calgary exhibitions listed as on view this August, but the verified exhibition information for ‘You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light’ is specific to the Observatory Gallery and to its August 16 end date. The gallery’s August public-program listing also notes the exhibition as closing that day.
