**Ghazaleh Avarzamani**, *Romance of Many Dimensions*, 2019. Bamboo Basket and wood, varied dimensions. Photo: Alison Postma. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Power takes root in our consciousness at defining moments in our lives. There are countless spaces in which the structure of power makes itself visible, but among the earliest settings are schoolyards and playgrounds where children learn how to win and lose. In childhood, winning offers little reward beyond social capital but as we grow older, power transforms and takes on different forms, it can express itself in the social dynamics of familial homes, classrooms and workplaces. International news coverage, with its cast of quarrelling political protagonists, communicates power as an alloying of economical, political and military might, the kind that courses through systems, influences and (de)constructs world orders. But no political system lasts forever — power is a sandcastle, a vulnerable fortress at risk of being brought down by the force of its own weight. Power is mutable, ever-shifting and mercurial.

There are imaginative and probing ways to interrogate these accumulations of power and their structures of control. For Tehran-born artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani — whose career spans two decades — the world is like a game board, where ideas and ideals congregate in a constant struggle for power. A complex code of game rules, learned behaviours, social norms and reward systems informs power dynamics that govern the arenas of everyday life. Avarzamani examines the instability of power and our understanding of it through works that address games, language and psychology.

Dividing her time primarily between Toronto and London, Avarzamani has completed several international artist residencies. The genesis of her career, however, can be traced to her studies in painting at Azad University in Tehran, where Avarzamani’s early works addressed gender; she notes that this theme eventually “disappeared or was layered with other meanings.” It was after completing her MFA at Central Saint Martins, London, that she became an artist resident at the Beijing Red Mansion Cultural and Art Museum. There, through her exchanges with her cohort, she experienced a notable departure. “I realized how much I was interested in language, in translation and mistranslation,” she recalls. Language, in turn, inspired her interest in gameplay, which became a lens that informs her mediation on disrupting power hierarchies. Her analytical frame is influenced by the politics of Southwest Asia, a region that she describes as being “a battlefield or game board, a puppet show. You don’t know what is true or false — there are plays staged behind the scenes.”

**Ghazaleh Avarzamani**, *Desire Is Tender Is Love Is Love*, 2018. Glycerine Soap and Wood, 142 x 49 x 76 cm. Photo: Dahlia Katz. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

These explorations inform material choices in her practice, and she eschews flattening expectations that her artwork should be “loyal to gender, race or material.” Intrepid and analytical, Avarzamani’s approach to sculpture embraces the use of bamboo, glass and plastic, as well as unorthodox materials like soap, loofah and butter across a number of scales. In recent years, she has been invited to create site-responsive sculptural commissions that challenged underlying systems of control; these include much-lauded public installations at the Aga Khan Museum, MOCA Toronto, the Toronto Biennial of Art and Frieze Sculpture Park.

One of the most identifiable features across her work is the colour blue, a recurrent and intentional choice. For Avarzamani, the presence of blue is motivated by conceptual underpinnings linked to her “research that finds similarities in dissimilar spheres of life — politics, psychology, games,” and its correlation with “informal teachings or codes of conduct we believe are part of our nature or culture” that are “invisible powers shaping the way we think.” She is influenced by the illusory qualities of blue: “It has impacted how we perceive all of the colours in the world.” Illusion is deployed as a subversive tactic in her work, revealing that she enjoys “playing with perspective, what you see isn’t actually what it is.” In her perception, the colour blue “also finds resonances with educational institutions, multinational corporations and hospitals,” which often use this colour to convey trust, safety and order [1].

Playgrounds are unexpected incubators of ideas of security, where children first learn to navigate rules through the imaginative realm of games [2]. Avarzamani’s Strange Temporalities (2018) explores this paradoxical terrain, where freedom and restraint coexist, through a segmented blue plastic slide supported by metal scaffolding. Exhibited in the park grounds of Frieze Sculpture 2019, a sculpture festival held in London each autumn, the setting reinforced the idea of playgrounds as sites of knowledge production that shape social and cultural understandings of the world. Playground slides are designed to physically constrain the body, employing gravity to dictate movement and impose an obvious set of predetermined rules on play. Strange Temporalities sustains an alternative perspective that questions the supposed safety net of ideological structures. The fragmented slide invites us to unlearn ingrained norms and reimagine our surroundings beyond rigid frameworks of success and failure. This shift in perspective, in turn, represents a breaking free from the constraints of societal expectations.

**Ghazaleh Avarzamani**, *Strange Temporalities*, 2018. Segmented Slide on Metal Armature, varied dimensions. Photo: Stephen White. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

**Ghazaleh Avarzamani**, *The Noble Game of Elephant and Castle*, 2023. Loofah and embroidery, 178 x 152 cm. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Revealing the invisible mechanisms of dominance is a recurring strategy in Avarzamani’s explorations of gameplay. In The Noble Game of Elephant and Castle or Travelling in Asia (2023), an embroidery on a synthetic loofah washcloth from Iran, Avarzamani traces the intersection of colonial mastery and domestic amusement in early 19th-century England. Colonial-era travel games, like Elephant and Castle, reinforced British imperialism by framing colonized lands as exotic, blending geography lessons with Orientalist narratives [3]. Reinterpreting the game, Avarzamani embroiders its 80-grid game sheet onto a royal blue loofah using white thread. Loofahs are abrasive washcloths customarily used in Southwest Asia and North Africa, for cleansing and exfoliation. Through this medium, Avarzamani evokes the impermanence of power structures — fragile systems that, like dead skin, can be exfoliated away to make way for renewal.

This theme — Avarzamani’s meditation on the strongholds of power — also appears in Mashrabiya (2021), a permanent architectural installation at MOCA Toronto. A mashrabiya is a traditional Islamic architectural feature that combines a balcony with latticework windows, extending from the upper floors of homes, mosques and palaces. Mashrabiyas serve both ornamental and functional purposes, regulating privacy, airflow and light. As a protective screen, the mashrabiya can be understood as a gendered architectural element, enabling women to observe the outside world while remaining concealed from public view [4].

**Ghazaleh Avarzamani***, Mashrabiya*, 2021. Painted aluminum, Ext: 350 x 233 x 120 cm - Int: 233 x 78 x 97 cm. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

The ways we see — and are seen — fundamentally shape our understanding of space and power. Avarzamani’s Mashrabiya examines how sight is mediated in museums, spaces that have particular systems of stewardship, surveillance and conservation built into their design [5]. When visitors engage with Mashrabiya they are either observing or being observed, but never both at once. With its intricate latticework, Mashrabiya alludes to a network of power structures that are often imperceptible and unknown to visitors within these civic spaces for contemplation. This public interaction activates how power, vision and control play out in galleries.

In Romance of Many Dimensions (2019), another interactive sculpture, Avarzamani brings the brutal arena of cockfighting — along with its ties to masculinity, sports and performance — into focus to examine human behaviour. As an ancient and ceremonial blood sport with origins in China, Persia and India [6], cockfighting pits two birds against each other in a fight to the death or critical injury, with the surviving bird declared the victor. Bred specifically for aggression, fighting cocks are trained to continue attacking despite extreme pain, exhaustion and severe injuries. In this context, gamecocks are manipulated for the benefit of spectators — primarily gamblers — who profit from victories and suffer financial losses from defeats [7].

Here, Avarzamani’s use of bamboo baskets is inspired by the rattan wickerworks used to transport, house and train the roosters. She elevates the baskets onto wooden platforms of varying heights, inviting visitors to move among, within and between the structures. When visitors stand inside these cages, the bamboo baskets take on a mask-like form, drawing attention to the relationships between behaviour and performance. By drawing on the inherent violence and financial stakes of cockfighting, the work critically examines the structures that govern performance and spectatorship, encouraging a broader reflection on power, ritual and control.

**Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ky Sattler**, *Happy Together*, 2022. Wood and aluminum, 155 x 264 cm. Photo: Alison Postma. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

While playgrounds and blood sports serve as arenas where power relations are mapped out, so too does love — one of the most primal human emotions — as evinced in Avarzamani’s Happy Together (2022), a collaborative sculpture with Pennsylvania-based artist Ky Sattler. Happy Together consists of two tri-blade wooden ceiling fans, whose hubs are connected by one extra-long blade. There is a foreboding quality about the fans’ attachment, as there is nothing happy about what appears to be a dysfunctional co-dependency — through their connection, the fans are rendered inoperable. The blended blades prevent either fan from spinning in any direction, evoking a sense of entrapment. Ceiling fans are associated with air, circulation and movement, but in this work, the fans are unable to deliver the respite of airflow. By subverting their functional use, the work suggests that relationships that once afforded freedom can become stifling. Even the use of wood, an organic material that alludes to the domestic sphere, is upended to underscore this stagnating union. Avarzamani titled this work after the Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together [8] (1997), a film about a turbulent romance between two men marked by jealousy, reconciliation and breakups [9]. In many ways, Avarzamani’s Happy Together can be understood as a portrait of the human psyche: our deep and incessant yearning for love, and the relinquishing of certain freedoms to establish a union, can restrict a lover.

Similarly, Desire Is Tender Is Love Is Love (2018), a pair of large glycerin soap sculptures, explores the transformation of human emotions over time. Borrowing from the language of minimalist sculpture, typified by its pure geometric forms, Avarzamani presents two oversized beige and blue soap blocks that continuously respond to environmental fluctuations in the gallery. As time passes and temperatures shift, the soap gradually breaks down, resulting in changes to colour, shape and opacity. Desire Is Tender Is Love Is Love draws parallels to the human mind and its adaptability. The soaps’ failed potential to clean gestures toward the impossibility of a “clean slate” — time leaves its imprints on human memory, and the lingering traces of the past always inform the building blocks of the future. By upending the use of soap, a material associated with bathing rituals and physical rejuvenation [10], the work argues that personal or political histories cannot be erased. The title of this work is drawn from Subversive Economies (PSS Press, 2018), a book of poetry by the Peruvian artist Daniella Valz Gen that contends with the same themes of romance, longing and nostalgia subtly alluded to in Avarzamani’s sculpture.

**Ghazaleh Avarzamani**, *Scratch Me, And I’ll Scratch You*, 2023. Butter and wood, 300 x 250 x 250 cm. Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Her interest in fables found fertile grounds while in residency at TKE STUDIOS, a foundation established by Tracey Emin, a leading member of the Young British Artists and one of the most influential women artists working today. There, she began the research that led to one of her most impressive ephemeral works to date. Scratch Me, And I’ll Scratch You (2023) is a colossal butter sculpture representing a crane perched above a fox with a plate at its feet, alongside a toppled vase. Mounted on a wooden table, a communal setting, the sculpture is imbued with the politics of hospitality, reciprocity and generosity, referencing how social structures are upheld. The work references Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Stork,” a tale of a mischievous fox who tricks his stork neighbour. As a prank, the fox invites the stork for dinner, and serves him a bowl of soup, which his guest cannot lap up with his beak. The stork reciprocates the gesture, inviting the fox for soup served in a slim vase. Unable to eat, the fox learns the valuable lesson to treat others with the same care we expect. Scratch Me, And I’ll Scratch You harnesses butter as a transformative agent, an alchemical substance that Avarzamani noted was first used as a “religious and ceremonial material before gradually becoming food [11].” The sculpture became an “opportunity to measure against the forces of time and temperature,” which underscores the effects of entropy. As a sensitive substance, butter reacts to environmental changes, softening and firming with fluctuations in temperature. Just like Avarzamani’s use of butter, the fox in the fable imparts a lesson about being nimble to changes in social relations.

Power establishes a relation of differences that can be reversed, altered or dismantled to create new ideals. Across these works, Avarzamani underscores the constructed ideas, materials and structures that inform our understanding of the world. Physical materials can reinforce a social construct or collapse an ideology, providing a reprieve from that which can constrain human imagination. Entropy allows us to see the world anew, reconstitute power and envision alternative ways of living. Growth, change and regeneration are themes evoked in Avarzamani’s practice, and they have manifested in significant milestones in her career.

This upcoming summer of 2025, Avarzamani’s first institutional solo exhibitions in London will open simultaneously at the Hayward Gallery and the Delfina Foundation, debuting a collaboration with Vancouver-based artist Ali Ahadi across the two venues. During an artist residency in 2024 on Fogo Island, N.L., she conducted research on “folklore and historical fables, marked by themes of monetary exchange, catastrophe and failure,” which will inform these two concurrent exhibitions.

The upcoming shows are representative of both Avarzamani’s continued research into power and relations, as well as an indicator of her growing status as an imaginative and influential thinker and artist. Recently, Avarzamani was profiled in Great Women Sculptors (Phaidon Press, 2024), an expansive survey of over 300 artists working in a variety of media, which highlighted her use of play to deconstruct “hierarchies of power in pieces that probe seemingly accessible, neutral spaces such as public parks and squares, museums, and civic buildings [12].” This acknowledgment of her contributions to contemporary art and analysis, which she executes in a playful and accessible manner, recognizes Avarzamani’s thought-provoking installations. Her work lingers in space and memory, and through her careful examination of the social and material conditions of our world, we are reminded that the materials that comprise the bastions of power are mutable.

[1] Ghazaleh Avarzamani, interview by author, January 2025.
[2] Delara Rahim et al., “Playing it Safe,” Canadian Centre for Architecture. https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/32/keep-safe/95665/playing-it-safe.
[3] “The Noble Game of the Elephant and Castle, or Travelling in Asia,” Brown University Library, accessed January 14, 2025, https://library.brown.edu/create/limangames/the-noble-game-of-the-elephant-and-castle-or-travelling-in-asia/.
[4] Jehan Mohamed, “The traditional arts and crafts of turnery or mashrabiya” (master’s thesis, Rutgers University, 2015), 29–30, https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/47126/.
[5] Ghazaleh Avarzamani, interview by author, January 2025.
[6] Roy Greene, “Cockfighting: A bit of history,” The Boston Globe, May 30, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/05/30/things-about-cockfighting/xjzt2C1IsnTyzKHjn8WmKP/story.html.
[7] “The facts about cockfighting,” The Humane Society of the United States, accessed January 15, 2025, https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/facts-about-cockfighting.
[8] “Happy Together,” Ghazaleh Avarzamani, accessed January 22, 2025, https://www.ghazalehavarzamani.com/happy-together.
[9] Shiv Kotecha, “Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘Happy Together’ Traces a Romance in Exile,” Frieze, February 11, 2022, https://www.frieze.com/article/wong-kar-wai-happy-together-2021.
[10] Suemedha Sood, “The origins of bathhouse culture around the world,” BBC online, November 29, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20121129-the-origins-of-bathhouse-culture-around-the-world.
[11] Ghazaleh Avarzamani, interview by author, January 2025.
[12] Jareh Das, “Ghazaleh Avarzamani,” in Great Women Sculptors, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre (London: Phaidon Press, 2024), 27.