“How can one garden in the ruins of empires as a gesture towards the future?” This question by Anahita Norouzi runs through Rift, an exhibition in six chapters that brings together large-scale film projections and new sculptural installations at the Musée d’art de Joliette and at Galerie de l’UQAM.
Rift evokes a fracture, a depression, or even a tear in the earth’s crust—an image that aptly conveys the exhibition’s theme, in which the past, like an active fault, continues to permeate the present. Using the history of oil exploitation in southwestern Iran as its point of departure, the exhibition explores how oil extraction, under the guise of “progress,” has damaged the land and destabilized the country. At the Musée d’art de Joliette, where the first two chapters of Rift are on view, Norouzi focuses primarily on how the development of film in the early twentieth century was interwoven with the growth of the oil industry. By regarding film production as a tool for cultural and political influence capable of shaping official narratives and public perceptions, Norouzi questions the moving image as much for what it shows as for what it conceals.
In her ambitious film collage titled False Arrivals, Norouzi creates a dialogue between the propaganda documentary film Persian Story (1952) and the revolutionary drama The Deer (1974), two films that are linked to turbulent periods in Abadan’s history. In Incomplete Burning, her large-scale installation composed of bricks, Norouzi evokes the tragedy at Abadan’s Cinema Rex, which was deliberately set on fire in 1978, shortly before the Islamic Revolution. Through these works, Norouzi partially opens a space of active remembrance against oblivion and of resourcefulness in the face of deadly forces that seek to smother lives and the beauty of the world.
Curators: Ariane De Blois and Louise Déry
Galerie de l’UQAM presents chapters III, IV, V and VI of Rift from November 6, 2026 to January 16, 2027.
Biography
Anahita Norouzi
Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist, working between Tehran and Montreal. Her practice is research-driven, examining the entanglement of colonial histories, extraction, and human relationships to land. Articulated across video, sculpture, installation, and photography, her work challenges institutional authority by reclaiming personal narratives and collective memories embedded in archives, museum collections, and herbarium pages, ultimately dissecting how power operates through systems of classification, representation, and historical erasure.
Her work has been presented at institutions including the National Gallery of Canada, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Arts, Royal Ontario Museum, Ashmolean Museum, and Villa Medici. She was a finalist for the 2023 Sobey Art Award and recipient of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec Contemporary Art Award. In 2026, she was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands.
Partners
A co-production of the Musée d'art de Joliette and the Galerie de l'UQAM.
The exhibition at the Galerie de l'UQAM will be presented from November 6, 2026 to January 16, 2027. For more information, visit the website of the Galerie de l'UQAM
