TechniCowlour

January 18 – March 15, 2025

Opening: January 18, 5 – 8 PM;
Featuring a free 20-min performance performed by Aryo at 6:30pm on Jan 18 (opening), and sliding scale tickets on Feb 12, Mar 1, and Mar 15 (closing)

ticket information

Gallery Hours: Wed – Sat, 12 – 6 PM

Co-produced by battery opera
Co-Presented by vAct and Centre A

Concept and creation by:
elika mojtabaei + Aryo Khakpour

In collaboration with:
Alanna Ho
ellis cheadle
Jaewoo Kang
SF Ho

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Centre A is excited to kick off 2025 with the announcement of our upcoming exhibition TechniCowlour!

“i just want to be a cow

in full colour

in full house

in full surround sound

free from all that makes me sad

— by Arika Mojpour (6th-century Persia)

TechniCowlour is an installation and performance exploring the intersections of mythology, memory, and sensory experience. At its core, the project queers and remixes materials—scents; fabrics; songs; gestures; and Iranian mythologies and architectural references—into a fragmented experience of longing; and questions the preservation of culture that persists in diasporic living, blurring the lines between the nostalgic and the immediate.

Across its three interconnected spaces, TechniCowlour invites viewers into a sensory dialogue that traverses the ancient past, the near past, and the present. One room binds light with absence; and houses retellings of pre-Zoroastrian deities in the form of costumes created from second-hand clothing. Another space envelops the audience in near darkness, where the intimate terrains of scent memories and tactile interactions take precedence over sight. The third space centres water, grounding us in the present—a momentary refuge entwined with the poetics of displacement and loss.

Our process began as a response to the Iranian film, The Cow (1969), which tells the story of a man’s unparalleled love for his cow, and his immense grief upon her death—an event that leads him to believe he has become his cow. TechniCowlour is an invocation of the body and the senses, undermining the customary cultural inertias in favour of an experimental adaptation. Here, nostalgia becomes an entry to presence rather than a retreat from it. Through the interplay of mythology, cinema, and haptic exploration, the piece asks: What does it mean to live between worlds that carry us across times?”

— The TechniCowlour creative team