Notice Board

Art NOW series featuring Mohammad Abbasi
The Third Space
October 24 | Noon | University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

My art practice is a conversation about transformation and landscape, pertaining both to the idea of Home and of Self. As an immigrant, my work seeks to navigate ‘The Third Space’ as experienced by diasporic populations, and negotiate what are the boundaries - what is ‘safe’?

Mohammad Abbasi is a visual artist and painter based in Edmonton, Canada. He received his MFA in Painting from the University of Alberta in 2023 and his MA in Painting from Tehran Azad University. Over the past decade, his work has used the language of painting to navigate the intersections of personal memory, displacement, and the social and political forces that shape lived experience.

Abbasi’s early series The Boat (2019) and In the Moment (2018) reflected on the constraints placed on women and the wider tensions within Iranian society on the eve of its civil awakenings, articulated through poetic metaphors of containment and fragility. After immigrating to Canada in 2021, his series The Home, presented at FAB Gallery in Edmonton, reimagined the architecture of home as a site of transformation—where the shifting identity of migrants takes form and dissolves. This exploration evolved further in The Third Space, exhibited at Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary, where Abbasi examined the psychological and cultural thresholds that define belonging and estrangement.

His upcoming solo exhibition, The Wave, opening at the Art Gallery of St. Albert in December 2025, weaves together earlier symbols of boats and accumulations to trace new visual narratives of cultural passage, memory, and renewal.

Image: Mohammad Abbasi, The Wave (cropped), charcoal on cardboard, 26x20 cm, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.