“In photography, a much greater importance should be given to the intellectual aspect of the work. Indeed, it should become the main artistic factor… creating the feelings we experience in the presence of a masterpiece.”
Pierre Dubreuil
The sky does not bend. It stretches above everything—unchanging, distant, sometimes heavy with its stillness.
As a child growing up during the Iran-Iraq war, and later as a refugee in Greece, the world beneath that sky was constantly shifting. Cities changed. Languages folded into one another. Familiar things disappeared, and new ones appeared without warning.
Under a sky that did not move, imagination became a way to live inside many worlds at once.
Some of this work returns to those early fragments of memory. Folding Patterns emerges from a small ritual during our refugee years in Athens. I gathered cardboard from the streets, and sometimes my Mother and I found paper sewing patterns which she used to make shirts for my father. Those patterns were always spread across the table—quiet, precise, and patient.
Decades later, photographing their folds and textures became a way of tracing migration through small material traces: cardboard, fabric, creases, and time. They are modest records of movement and survival.
Other images move into a more dreamlike terrain. Ghostly figures appear as echoes of memory—presences that feel both distant and close.
Animals drift through these landscapes as quiet symbols. A crane glides through time, suggesting continuity and eternity. A crow embodies the intelligence of adaptation, learning how to survive and remake its world again and again. Owls watch silently at the edges of perception.
Together these figures inhabit a space between memory and imagination.
The sky may not bend. But the worlds beneath it fold, fracture, merge, echo out and open—allowing infinite possibilities to coexist across loss, discovery, delight, and wonder.
-Osheen Harruthoonyan
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Canada Council for the Arts mandate is to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. Through its grants, services, prizes, initiatives, and payments, the Canada Council supports a dynamic and diverse arts and literary scene. These activities generate a meaningful cultural, social and economic impact for over 2,000 communities in all parts of the country and beyond. The investments and leadership of the Council help advance public engagement in the arts from coast to coast to coast while also contributing to the international recognition of artists and arts organizations from Canada.
