fORUM is Mercer Union’s event series for talks, lectures, interviews, screenings, and performances.
Location:
Main Hall
1 Spadina Crescent
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
University of Toronto
Rouzbeh Akhbari leads an artist talk around his new film and the subject of his first institutional solo exhibition in Canada, Of Wool and Diesel (2026), presented at Mercer Union as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Situating the project within a growing body of work, the artist will speak to the way maritime borderscapes and trade histories connected to the Strait of Hormuz have informed the last five years of his practice as a filmmaker and human geographer.
Among the thinkers who have most crucially shaped Akhbari’s research is Shahram Khosravi, professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. By way of an introduction, Akhbari will share the influence of Khosravi’s writings in Seeing Like A Smuggler (2022) and The Gaze of the X-Ray: An Archive of Violence (2024) on his long-term research, and elaborate on their collaboration over the past years.
Khosravi will then deliver a lecture on how we might read the role of informal trade in maintaining transnational connections across the Strait of Hormuz beyond the state-centric geopolitical discourses common at the moment. The event will close with a conversation between the two speakers and questions from the audience.
