Ghazaleh Avarzamani: Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return

Ghazaleh Avarzamani: Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return is a ticketed exhibition on Tuesday, July 7, 2026 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM at Contemporary Calgary in Calgary.

Examining familiar objects and settings — playgrounds, board games, sport arenas — Ghazaleh Avarzamani traces the subtle architectures through which power is learned, rehearsed and maintained. What appears playful or ordinary reveals itself as something more insistent: a hostile choreography of rules, conquests and defeats insidiously shaping social and political life. Beneath the surface of games, manuals, fables, and educational references in Avarzamani’s works lie the economic, psychological and ideological structures that govern the ways in which people belong to society.Avarzamani’s installations unfold as spaces that are at once seductive and destabilizing. Familiar forms return altered, carrying a quiet sense of unease. Nursery rhymes, games and instructions no longer function as benign cultural expressions, but as mechanisms through which societies naturalize obedience, hierarchy and collective fantasy. Poetic, sarcastic and politically incisive, her work attends to the paradoxes embedded within educational methodologies, exposing how systems of control often appear in the language of entertainment, participation and progress.Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return extends this inquiry through a seemingly playful environment comprising sculptures, textiles, illustrative images, text, found and archival objects. Yet in this new installation, inspired by the Monopoly game, the stakes gradually emerge as more sombre. Cycles of labour, accumulation, exhaustion and repetition move through the space like rules of a game already in motion before the viewer arrives. Throughout the exhibition, each game token operates as an allegory of hierarchy, assigning value, status and movement. The familiar riding horse is replaced with a sardonic reference to the representation of the Prince of Wales and his horse at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925, where Canada famously presented a life-size butter sculpture of the royal in celebration of imperial power, directly linking the logic of Monopoly to the spectacle of territorial expansion, extraction and the gamification of ownership. Butter recurs throughout the exhibition as both material and metaphor: tied equally to the labour of churning and the volatility of churning markets, where instability, excess and collapse remain in constant circulation.At a moment marked by large-scale political and economic shifts that often leave individuals feeling powerless, Avarzamani’s practice insists on the inherent possibilities of recognition. By making visible the systems that quietly organize daily life, her work opens a space for critical attention, disruption and refusal.Curated by Mona Filip.