An Injury On the Diasporic Imagination: Chad Wong & Pegah Tabassinejad
Pegah Tabassinejad, 0503233, inkjet print on vinyl, dimensions variable
Exhibition runs May 8, 2025–June 20, 2025
Artist Talk: Saturday May 31st, 2025 4–6PM
Film Screening: June 5th: 6:00–8:30 PM
“The homeland is no longer a dwelling. Instead, the diaspora dwells in the signs of belonging and the simulacra of memory.”
—Homi Bhabha
An Injury On the Diasporic Imagination foregrounds the transactional nature of citizenship and movement, the politics of diasporic belonging, and the fractured ways in which images and memories of landscapes, people, and moments of societal rupture are formed and proliferated in a world shaped by the domineering presence of surveillance and digital culture.
Through aesthetic techniques rooted in digital and surveillance media—including glitch, repetition, redaction, and the pervasiveness of the illegible image—exhibiting artists Chad Wong and Pegah Tabassinejad explore the dual function of surveillance imagery as both a tool of oppression and a means of bearing witness, documenting place, and reasserting one’s humanity.
In the hands of Tabassinejad and Wong, these images embody an ongoing negotiation of diasporic identity, alluding to the responsibilities that individuals across the diaspora carry in their remembrance and perception of place, and the gestures of active solidarity that might be enacted in moments of upheaval in the places they call home.
The “injury” then , refers to the wound inflicted on both the collective and individual psyche during these moments of disruption—wounds that provoke deeper questions around home, identity, and what it means to be a body dislocated, in transit, or unmoored.
Olumoroti George
Director/Curator
Artist Talk: Saturday May 31st, 2025 4–6PM
With exhibiting artists Pegah Tabassinejad and Chad Wong in conversation with Director/Curator Olumoroti George
Film Screening: June 5th: 6:00–8:30 PM
As a part of our An Injury On the Diasporic Imagination exhibition programming, join us June 5th from 6:00-8:30 PM for a special feature screening of My Stolen Planet (2024) directed by Farahnaz Sharifi. The evening will begin with an excerpt reading by exhibiting artist, Chad Wong, from Tiffany Sia's book Too Salty Too Wet, and the film will begin promptly at 6:30 PM and conclude with an open group discussion.
“‘My Stolen Planet’ is a diary-style narrative by Farah, an Iranian filmmaker. Born during the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, she captures moments of joy and defiance in her daily life, navigating the contrast between domestic freedom and external oppression. Simultaneously, she collects 8mm archives from people she doesn't know. Relying on others' recordings, she gains a new perspective on losing memories.Her connection with Leyla, an Iranian professor who left Iran during the revolution, adds a name and story to one of her archive's faces. Farah's mother, suffering from Alzheimer's, motivates her to fight against forgetting. In the fall of 2022, the Women, Life, Freedom uprising became a turning point in Farah's life, as well as in the lives of many others in Iran. This is a homemade history.”
Please RSVP here: https://form.jotform.com/251487796852273
Chad Wong is a lens based visual artist residing in the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy ̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx ̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Born in 1993, Wong received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2016.
His exhibitions include “我住喺呢度嘅!/I live here!” which was part of Capture Photography Festival 2024, "Empty Spaces that Fill My Heart" at Aberdeen Skytrain Station (2022) and “Ma Fan Cafe” at the Richmond Art Columns organized by Richmond Art Gallery. His photographs have been featured in C-Mag and Broad Magazine. Wong's work primarily explores the evolving cultural landscapes of the Hong Kong-Chinese-Canadian diaspora, capturing the intricate connections between identity, memory and space.
Pegah Tabassinejad is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Iran who is living and working on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and Sel̓ íl̓ witulh peoples.
Tabassinejad's new media practice primarily revolves around the construction of digital and live performances, film, video installations and city projects. Her practice acts as an interrogation on themes that include the intersection of digital and surveillance culture on identity, virtual and physical presences and absences, and the forces that structure and shape the movement and perception of marginalized and female bodies in private and public space.
Tabassinejad holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Stage Direction from the Tehran University of Art. She also studied Visual Art at Azad University in Tehran. She has taught various studio and seminar courses at the Tehran University of Art, Bamdad International House, Barg Institute, and Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She was the recipient of the Phil Lind Multicultural Artist Residency at UBC in 2023–2024.
Her projects have been shown locally and internationally. Her latest eight-channel video installation, Entropic Fields of Displacement, premiered in Vancouver at VIVO Media Arts and in Amsterdam at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2024, and won the prestigious IDFA Award in digital storytelling.
