A grandmother's voice drifts softly through the vault at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, carrying a story passed down through generations. This story has never been written down, but visitors can see it come to life through illustration.
The gallery's latest exhibition, Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun) by Iranian-Canadian artist Naghmeh Sharifi, transforms the lower-level gallery vault into an immersive storytelling space. The exhibition will run until Aug. 23, and guests are invited to visit the gallery on July 10 at 6:30 p.m. for an in-person tour, or join online on July 16 at noon through Facebook.
Projected onto layers of fabric is Sharifi's animated illustration of an old Iranian folk tale, narrated by the voice of her late grandmother.
Curator Emily Baker said Sharifi remembers hearing her grandmother tell her this bedtime tale during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s when she was a child. Then, years later, when she was living in Canada, she recorded her grandmother telling the story.
"It was just meant to be a personal memento and her grandmother did pass fairly soon after that," said Baker. "She [Sharifi] decided as a way of trying to stay close to her grandmother, a method of sort of processing grief and holding this story really close to try and illustrate the story, because it doesn't exist visually or written down anywhere."
It took Sharifi three months to finish the project, and she worked with other artists to bring the piece to life. Baker said illustrating the story was a challenge for Sharifi, as she couldn't figure out what the main character would look like.
"She [Sharifi] is like, 'I didn't have any visual references for heroines, for what girls would look like, because growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, every girl in a story was stripped out of visual culture,'" said Baker. "Women were covered in veils and shrouds and layers of clothing. She's like, 'I just couldn't picture her. And so she kept changing, I kept drawing and erasing, and it just wasn't working.'"
While working on the illustrations in Adobe Fresco, a digital art app, Sharifi discovered the program automatically recorded each mark, erasure, and change. That process turned into an animation, capturing both the final images and the act of drawing itself.
The final work is projected across three pieces of fabric layered throughout the vault. As visitors move through the space, fragments of the story appear and disappear.
"You can see it clearly on the bits of fabric that are draped there, but you can't see the whole thing all at once," said Baker. "If you look behind the fabric on the floor, there's these echoes that kind of surround you, and they get projected onto you, and so it's like you are also an active part of this story."
Sharifi intentionally left the recording in Farsi without subtitles, inviting viewers to interpret the story in their own way. Baker said they will have booklets with a synopsis of the story and a list of characters in it.
"A lot of things get lost in translation, and especially when there's deep cultural history and nuance to these stories as well," Baker said.
Baker quoted Sharifi as saying, "I don't want to create something that feels a lot flatter than it is, because you've lost so much by translating it."
"So she's hoping that people come through and find some of that wonder, some of that magic of like bedtime stories or oral stories that get passed down," Baker said.
The exhibition not only honours Sharifi's grandmother but pays tribute to generations of Iranian women who preserved their culture through oral storytelling.
"I think this work wasn't planned with the idea that major political unrest would be happening or chaos would be happening, but it reminds us that there are human people who are living there," said Baker. "There's these generations of women who maybe didn't have the opportunity to go to school, or do the things that girls and women can now. But they held these stories. They held our culture for us and passed it down through the generations. And that's really special."
Fading Fables was selected through last year's open call for submissions. Baker said it was a perfect fit for the vault space, calling it a visually stunning exhibition and encouraging people to come see it.
"I feel like people are always very curious about the stories of other cultures. And so it doesn't matter where you come from in the world," said Baker. "If someone sits down like, let me tell you a story my grandmother told me, everyone's going to want to know regardless of where they are, who they came from. So it felt like this really beautiful entry point into a lot of really interesting ideas that could be talked about."
