Light Through Scars
Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC - July 4 – Sept 30
With a quarter of our present century suddenly behind us, grief has arguably emerged as the dominant emotion behind both the making of our art and how it is experienced, particularly among younger and emerging artists. Nowhere is this grief more apparent than through the wound. Inspired by a line from the 13th century Sufi master Rumi (“The wound is the place where the Light enters you”), this group exhibition, curated by Parvin Peivandi, “explores the transformative and healing capacities of artistic practice in diverse mediums.”
The common ground guiding Light Through Scars is artistic responses to some of the many geopolitical conflicts currently raging across our climate-compromised planet. Oksana Zbrutska is a Pentictonbased Ukrainian artist whose response to displacement takes the form of paintings inspired by children’s books, focused on joy, journey and folkloric memories of her homeland. For her part, Peivandi’s Utopian Rug (2026) is a ceramic installation whose featureless figures are drawn from Iranian literature and material traditions like weaving, an example of the artist-curator’s “ongoing inquiry into existential questions of being, becoming and belonging.”
Lens-based artist Solange Adum Abdala centres the stories of her parents’ displacement from Palestine, combing through history and nature to form a landscape amenable to the convergence of body and space-time, while Ghinwa Yassine uses video, photography, performance and writing to honour the body as a carrier of both individual agency and collective memory. In conjunction with the exhibition, a public program that includes collaborations with art therapists and educators is being offered in addition to artist talks and community workshops.
