Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents

Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents posits the underground as a rhizomatic commons to consider the imperceptible nexuses within a fractured land of colonial extraction. Through the works of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Alvin Luong, Sanaz Sohrabi, and Beichen Zhang, the underground is transformed into a site that collapses temporal and spatial distance, bringing together seemingly disjointed constellations of colonial and environmental discourses.

Foregrounding imperial complicity as an ethnographic site, Sanaz Sohrabi’s archival dig of West Asia’s petro-utopia resonates with Beichen Zhang’s tracing the voyage of tele-modernities in the South China Sea. In the momentary surge where crude oil crosses over undersea cables, monopolies of colonial extraction are transformed into false utopias. Moreover, the attritional lethalities enacted through practices of extraction exist at the peripheries of different regional histories. In the work of Alvin Luong, the remnants of the real estate bubble in Ho Chi Minh City fold fragments of war and resistance into a possible future underwater due to sea level rise. In a montage of suburban images by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko, fabulations of teenage zombie frenzies and eugenic sentiments about a Holstein cow coexist with realities of uranium poisoning on native lands.

From rare earth minerals to undersea infrastructures, subterranean petroleum sites to suburban sewage holes, the morphing landscape of colonial extraction reveals amnesias of a past rendered invisible to the optics, hidden underground and growing hauntingly present the deeper we move. The underground sites of extractive regimes, with their distinct localities, bring into conversation the geophysical, geopolitical, and geological repercussions of neoliberalism, colonialism, militarism, and the climate crisis.

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2024–25 research theme Undergrounds/Underworlds.

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. We are indebted to all the Indigenous people across Turtle Island to be able to work on this land.