Opening September 18th in the Alternator Project Gallery is Debris of a Mother Tongue by Reyhan Yazdani.
Reyhan Yazdani’s first solo exhibition in Kelowna, Debris of a Mother Tongue, brings together works on paper, sculptures, and digitally fabricated objects within an imaginary archaeological site to explore the ecology of language. Emerging from Yazdani’s experiences of diaspora and motherhood, the exhibition considers a mother tongue as a rhizome of relations between bodies, places, histories, and generations—relations continually unsettled and reconfigured through displacement.
“In Farsi, a tomato is called gojeh farangi—literally, a foreign berry. When my child voices the word gojeh farangi to ask for it, we both encounter a form of rupture: one geographical, the other generational.”
Throughout the exhibition, Yazdani approaches familial and linguistic fragments as points of entry into questions of inheritance, memory, and belonging. Fragments, absences, and half-remembered words and images become a vocabulary for thinking through diaspora and displacement, where meaning is held as much in what is missing as in what remains.
The exhibition’s title, Debris of a Mother Tongue, considers debris as both aftermath and living matter: fragments separated from the structures that once held them, yet still carrying traces of those structures within them. A mother tongue exists through a similar condition of dispersal. Carried across geographies and generations, language gathers histories of land, violence, intimacy, and exchange, while shedding and transforming parts of itself along the way. The works inhabit this space between rupture and continuation, where language and body become porous sites for what has been inherited and displaced. Maternal and speculative forms emerge within this landscape in states of metamorphosis, approaching rupture as a generative space for speculation.
Within this ecology, diasporic mothering becomes a form of transmission. Language, memory, and bodily knowledge move from one body and one generation toward another, inevitably changing in the passage. Motherhood emerges not as a fixed figure, but as a transformative condition: a space of carrying, protecting, reproducing, and becoming otherwise.
Reyhan Yazdani (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people. Her research-driven work migrates between a range of media including handmade paper, objects, social invitations, and creative writing to engage with ontological, material and spatial inquiries on themes of exile, displacement, and diasporic approaches to care and belonging.
Yazdani holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran. Her practice has been supported through grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council, alongside exhibitions and artist residencies across Canada. Her work has been presented at Kelowna Art Gallery, Seymour Art Gallery, Two Rivers Gallery, Open Studio, and Centre A, with recent and upcoming residencies including Nomadisms at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2026) and Fondazione Officine Saffi in Milan (2027). Yazdani is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Check out more of Reyhan’s work on her Instagram.