Of Wool and Diesel

“Watch while tending, tend while watching”: Rouzbeh Akhbari’s Of Wool and Diesel

Based in Lisbon and Toronto, Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist, filmmaker, and geographer working across exhibition and cinema contexts. His practice explores the underlying forces that organize movement, territory, and memory, attending to the frictions between lived experience and constructed histories. Developed over five years of fieldwork and archival research, Of Wool and Diesel is a new commission that marks his first institutional solo exhibition in Canada.

Akhbari’s film installation considers border landscapes and their entanglements with seafaring histories. Set along the International North–South Transport Corridor¹, the work follows the smuggling of sheep from the Caspian littoral around Astara, Azerbaijan, through the Strait of Hormuz to the port of Khasab, Oman. Centring the minor figures along this journey, such as a shepherd, a smuggler, a historian, an underwriter, and a pair of lovers, the work unfolds through stories of survival and risk, desire and longing.

Although deeply anchored in trade-linked and maritime histories of empire, the film expresses a latent romanticism through poetic interplays of language, dramatic lighting, and experimental camera techniques. In its animated sequences, the grand interior of the Lisbon Geographical Society—a colonial-era lobby group and museum—is reimagined as a distressed vessel adrift in the strait, carrying replicas of documents and artefacts from the artist’s research. Here, the strait becomes a gateway onto distant places and shifting times.

In the gallery, Akhbari materializes the cadence of an informal passage at sea. Along the walls, a row of postcards, available for visitors to take, references 19th-century drawings from the British hydrographic survey of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Organized by cardinal position, the drawings remap an archival horizon—its incompleteness marked by gaps that indicate uncharted stretches of coastlines. Intermittently illuminated in rhythm with the film’s progression, the shifting visibility of these drawings recalls the sea at night traversed by headland beacons and nautical signals. On the floor, handcrafted namad—or felt works—feature motifs based on marine navigation lights and are produced with wool sourced from the same informal trade networks.

From encounters in the field to research within archives, Akhbari draws on the relational and the phenomenological to trace the smuggling of sheep within a broader history of maritime commerce, piracy, navigation, and empire. Where the necessity of movement meets the possibility of exposure, Of Wool and Diesel turns to the generative intimacy of shared risk to examine the overlapping currents that continue to shape the political life of the strait.

—Aamna Muzaffar and Allison Glenn

Co-commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art, Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística (Lisbon), and the National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement Initiative. The exhibition is organized by Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, co-presented with the Toronto Biennial of Art, and made possible with the generous support of RBC. The artist would like to acknowledge support from Partners in Art, the Ontario Arts Council, the Alserkal Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts.