The Jackman Humanities Institute’s Program for the Arts, the Centre for South Asian Studies, and the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, University of Toronto, jointly present
Papers and Gardens:
A Conversation with Artist Bahar Behbahani
Thursday, February 12, 2026, 4:00 p.m.
Rm 208N, North House
1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON M5S 3K7
In-Person Registration Link:
https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/papers-and-gardens-conversation-artist-bahar-behbahani
Please join us for an artist’s talk with Tehran-born and Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahani on imperial politics and archival art. Behbahani’s volumenous and multi-genre body of work draws on a variety of materials and tradtiions, exploring the interplay between the political, ecological, and aesthetic histories. In creatively recasting declassified material in abstract and environmental landscapes, her work, often thematically meditating on the Persian Garden, inaugurates a different relation to archival questions. Behbahani will be in conversation with Anjali Nath from the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology.
About the Speakers
Bahar Behbahani’s research-based practice approaches landscape as a metaphor for politics and poetics. Behbahani looks into cultural landscapes both historically and in a contemporary context, posing urgent questions that consider the ways in which people negotiate space and place. Through a range of media—such as painting, video, installation and performative talks—she excavates historiography to shift the interactions between knowledge and power in historic and imperial contexts to a poetic body of work. Behbahani is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award for an anticipated project Ispahan Flowers Only Once, a community garden inspired by Persian garden design, philosophy, plants and flora, which will bring people together to take part and re-activate the unseen histories by gathering and gardening. Born in Tehran, Iran, into an artistic family of writers, painters, musicians and puppeteers, Behbahani relocated to the US and currently works in Brooklyn, NY.
Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on the visual culture of American militarism, with a focus on document redaction, transparency, and the archives of state violence. Her current book project, A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War, is a critical reckoning with the racial and imperial work of paper as mobilized in the service of American militarism. Nath’s research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the University of California office of the President, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Her essays and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Studies in Documentary Film, Visual Anthropology and elsewhere. Nath co-edits the newly inaugurated Critical Militarization Studies book series on University of Michigan Press, with Dr. Crystal Baik. Prior to joining the faculty at UTM, Nath held positions at University of California, Davis and the American University of Beirut.
Shahrzad Mojab is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto. Professor Mojab has served as the Interim Principal of New College, and Director of Women and Gender Studies Institute. She is the past-President of the Canadian Association for the Studies of Adult Education. Her internationally recognized research explores the areas of educational policy studies, as well as race, gender, class, transnational feminism, and Marxist-feminism.
Mitra Fakhrashrafi is a Toronto-based archivist and curator working with the Muslims in Canada Archives and Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts. Her practice explores social movement histories and their sticky imprint on the present.
Supported by the The Jackman Humanities Institute’s Program for the Arts and co-sponsored by the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies.
