Home, Conceived and Perceived: What to Keep, What to Leave

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Mahdi Mahdian,″The Desert’s Wardrobe,″ 2025, oil on canvas, 24" x 36"

Home, Conceived and Perceived: What to Keep, What to Leave

Mahdi Mahdian

Neutral Ground Window Gallery

Saturday | August 30, 2025 | 8-11:30pm

In partnership with Nuit Blanche Regina 2025

Nuit Blanche Regina 2025:

Home, Conceived and Perceived: What to Keep, What to Leave

This window installation reflects on displacement, memory, and the emotional fragments of home. At its centre, an empty white clothes rack stands as a symbol of absence. Behind it, three oil paintings lean quietly: a bundle of scattered clothes under a starry sky, two sealed boxes in a moonlit field, and a row of winter coats—each evoking what is left behind, what is stored, and what is missing.

Above and around the space, irregular threads hold small photographs clipped with clothespins. These images were sent to the artist by friends in Ukraine, documenting the scattered contents of his former home and studio. From Canada, Mahdian was asked to choose—what to keep, what to let go, what still mattered.

Drawn from personal experience of exile from Iran to Ukraine and then to Canada, the work becomes a quiet archive of survival, shaped by absence and the shifting boundaries of what we call “home.”