MFA Nazli Tabkhi

PARIAH

July 21 - August 1, 2025

Gordon Snelgrove Gallery

Gallery hours: Mondays - Fridays from 10am - 4pm

Reception: Friday, July 25th from 7 - 10pm

About the Exhibition

Pariah unfolds as a quiet resistance, rooted in fragmentation, refusal, and the unease of never fully belonging. Absence here is not empty, but charged: a weight that lingers. Through intimate materials—hair, handwriting, water, layers of paper—the self emerges not as whole, but as fractured, shifting, unresolved.

Guided by psychoanalytic threads—repetition, erasure, the unconscious—this practice gives form to what slips language. The works hold tension between presence and disappearance, between visibility and concealment. Memory takes shape through form, not to resolve loss, but to stay with it.

To be a pariah is not a failure to belong, but a position from which to see what is cast aside—and to stay there, looking.

About the Artist

Nazli Tabkhi (b. 1995, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Tehran and is completing her MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Working across installation, drawing, and text-based media, her practice explores states of absence, rupture, and the unresolved self. Through fragile, intimate materials such as hair, paper, and handwriting, Nazli composes quiet yet persistent traces—gestures shaped by repetition, erasure, and accumulation. Informed by a psychoanalytic approach, her work does not seek resolution; instead, it dwells in the margins of what resists articulation, forming spaces where presence is felt through what remains.

Programming and Events

Reception: Friday, July 25th from 7 - 10pm