Hana Hozhabr Pour, Anticipation for the Sunrise, found canvases, acrylic sheets, sewn canvas, acrylic and oil paint, 2024
The Mountains as Archive
Hana Hozhabr Pour
A Space Windows
September 18 – November 14, 2026
Four windows open onto fragmented horizons—covered, displaced, and blurred—openings toward the mountains of Kurdistan, where “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”—Woman, Life, Freedom—was forged through Kurdish women’s resistance and carried through bodies, generations, and landscapes.
Each painting is formed through repeated layers of canvas placed over one another. Gestures accumulate, overlap, become covered, and reappear. Abstract and figurative forms move across the surfaces, creating a tension between visibility and disappearance. What lies beneath the surface is invisible, but not necessarily absent. The mountains become repositories for songs, voices, and histories that were never recorded—or were purged from the written archives. They hold traces of witnesses, movements, perceptions, and memories passed through generations. Trees and mountains become places where memory can persist beyond the written record.
Women’s bodies carry and transform histories that have been erased, displaced, or silenced. Through birth, labour, movement, loss, care, and resistance, the body becomes a living archive—not a passive record, but a dynamic site where wounded histories flow, transform, and re-emerge. The layers of canvas hold a similar tension. One gesture remains beneath another; one colour continues beneath another; one form disappears and returns in another shape. The paintings do not attempt to uncover everything. Instead, they allow different layers to exist simultaneously: visible and hidden, remembered and forgotten, personal and public.
The work considers how histories can survive through bodies, land, objects, memory, and movement, even when they are absent from dominant archives. What lies beneath does not disappear. It remains present within the layer—creating a space for memory, transformation, reparation, resistance, and repair.
Biography
Hana Hozhabr Pour’s multidisciplinary practice investigates how histories survive through bodies, landscapes, materials, and memory when they have been erased or excluded from dominant archives. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, moving image, and mixed media, she uses layering, fragmentation, repetition, and movement to explore the relationship between visibility and disappearance. Rooted in her experience of Kurdistan and the diasporic condition, her practice considers the body as a living archive and the landscape as a site where memory can persist beyond the written record. Her work examines how personal and collective histories are carried across generations, transformed, and reappear through material and embodied forms of resistance. Her current installation continues work presented at GradEx 109 at OCAD University, bringing together four paintings, windows, found objects, and a short moving image, to create an experience of passing through a fragmented landscape.