Full Title: Platform Talk | Curators in Conversation: Collaboration as Artistic and Institutional Development in the work of Rouzbeh Akhbari
Location: Platform Stage
Description:
Curators Aamna Muzaffar, Alison Glenn and Ann Marie Peña are in conversation discussing artist Rouzbeh Akhbari’s newly commissioned multi-media installation Of Wood and Diesel, currently on exhibition at Mercer Union, co-presented with the Toronto Biennial of Art.
The conversation will consider what it means to collaborate on the development of a work within the current arts eco-system in Canada. Co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada; Mercer Union, Toronto; the Toronto Biennial of Art; and HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística, Lisbon; and organized by Mercer Union for its first presentation in September 2026, Of Wool and Diesel demonstrates how collaboration can sustain artistic and institutional development, as well as collection building. The work has been conceived with future iterations in mind, allowing it to travel beyond its initial presentation and encounter communities across Canada. Within this context, the panel will further reflect on the aspirations of the National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement initiative: to work in partnership with local organizations, and consider how artworks can enter into the lived realities of communities in new and meaningful ways.
Working across film, installation, archival research and fieldwork, Akhbari’s practice examines the political ecology of borders, trade, infrastructure, and human geography. The curators will discuss how the artist’s work attends to the intimate and often invisible forms of labour, exchange, and power that organize contemporary life. Of Wool and Diesel, nurtured along through conversations with Muzaffar spanning the past few years, emerged from Akhbari’s research in maritime border zones along the International North–South Transit Corridor. The project brings together a moving-image piece, a series of print works, and a large-scale felted wool floor installation, drawing directly on the archival histories of shepherds, corsairs and the movements of people and cargo in the Strait of Hormuz. The curators discuss how the installation approaches contemporary geo-political borders as lived environments shaped by movement, memory, rumour, and embodied knowledge.
The panel will conclude with an audience Q&A.
Speakers:
Ann Marie Peña, Curator, National Gallery of Canada
Aamna Muzaffar, Curator, Mercer Union
Allison Glenn, Curator, Toronto Biennial of Art
Co-Presented with the National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement Initiative.
Image Caption: Rouzbeh Akhbari, Of Wool and Diesel, 2026. Installation view: Mercer Union, Toronto, 2026. Co-presented as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2026. 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. Photography: Vuk Dragojevic.
October 30
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Artist Bio
Allison Glenn
Allison Glenn is a New York-based curator and writer focusing on the intersection of art and public space through public art and special projects, biennials, and major new commissions by a wide range of contemporary artists. For over fifteen years, Glenn has been devoted to realizing ambitious and experimental exhibitions and site-specific projects with artists working across the globe.
She gained broad acclaim for curating the pathbreaking 2021 exhibition Promise, Witness, Remembrance at Louisville, Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum. The exhibition reflected on the life of Breonna Taylor through the work of over twenty contemporary artists including Amy Sherald, Nari Ward, Bethany Collins, and Glenn Ligon. Glenn has held positions including Co-Curator of Counterpublic Triennial 2023; Visiting Curator, at The University of Tulsa, where she curated the Sovereign Futures convening; Senior Curator at New York’s Public Art Fund; and, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In this role, Glenn shaped how outdoor sculpture activates and engages Crystal Bridges’ 120-acre campus through a series of new commissions, touring group exhibitions, and long-term loans by artists including Amanda Ross-Ho, Odili Donald Odita, George Sanchez-Calderon, and Rashid Johnson. She also held a curatorial position with New Orleans’ international art triennial Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp.
Glenn has published widely, contributing essays to catalogs produced by The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Counterpublic Triennial, Prospect New Orleans, Studio Museum in Harlem, Princeton Architectural Press, Neubauer Collegium, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and periodicals including Artforum, ART PAPERS, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and ART21 Magazine. Glenn sits on the Board of Directors for ARCAthens, an international curatorial and artist residency program. She received dual Master’s degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism as well as Arts Administration and Policy. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Photography with a co-major in Urban Studies from Wayne State University in Detroit.
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