Rouzbeh Akhbari leads an artist talk around his new film and the subject of his first institutional solo exhibition in Canada, Of Wool and Diesel (2026). Situating the project within a growing body of work, the artist will speak to the way maritime borderscapes and trade histories have informed the last five years of his practice as a filmmaker and human geographer.
Among the thinkers who have most crucially shaped Akhbari’s research is Shahram Khosravi, Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. By way of an introduction, Akhbari will share the influence of Khosravi’s writings in Seeing Like A Smuggler (2022) and The Gaze of the X-Ray: An Archive of Violence (2024) on his long-term research, and elaborate on their collaboration over the past years. Khosravi will then deliver a lecture on how we might read the role of informal trade in maintaining transnational connections across the Strait of Hormuz beyond the state-centric geopolitical discourses common at the moment. The event will close with a conversation between Akhbari and Khosravi moderated by Haseeb Ahmed, Assistant Professor, and coordinator of the 2026/2027 Visual Studies Public Lecture Series.
Image: Rouzbeh Akhbari, Of Wool and Diesel, 2026. Installation View: Mercer Union, Toronto, 2026, co-presented with the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2026. Co-commissioned by Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, the Toronto Biennial of Art, HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística (Lisbon), and the National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement Initiative. Photography: Vuk Dragojevic.
Artist Bio
Rouzbeh Akhbari
Rouzbeh Akhbari (b. 1992, Tehran) is an artist, filmmaker and human geographer based between Toronto and Lisbon. His moving-image practice sits at the intersection of documentary storytelling, fieldwork and poetic speculation. Working across film and installation, his projects investigate the political and ecological entanglements of trade and infrastructures across various geographies, tracing how the forces of empire continue to be inscribed in material landscapes.
Akhbari’s solo and collaborative works have been presented internationally at major film festivals and institutions, including Sao Paulo International Film Festival, Tirana International Film Festival (Winner, Best Video Art & Experimental, 2024), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (Winner, Prix George for Best International Documentary, 2020), Media City Film Festival, London Short Film Festival and DocsLisboa among many others. His films and installations have also been exhibited widely at museums and public institutions including Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art (Antwerp), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), MAC VAL (Paris), Villa Arson (Nice) and Si Shang Art Museum (Bejing).
He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, most recently the Calouste Gulbenkian Production award (2025) and Alserkal Foundation Research Fellowship (2025–27). Akhbari holds an MFA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the same institution.
Akhbari is one-half of Pejvak, the critically acclaimed artist duo with Felix Kalmenson.
Artist Bio
Shahram Khosravi
Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and currently an accidental Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University. His research interests include anthropology of Iran and the Middle East, migration, forced displacement, and border studies. He is an acclaimed author of several academic books and articles.
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