Current and Upcoming Shows
What I Made When My People Were Dying
Aynaz Raoufian and Mona Sahi | MFA Intermedia
October 13 - 24, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 15, 7 - 9 p.m.
(U of A faculty, staff, students and invited guests)
View the Raoufian pdf E-vite | View the Sahi pdf E-vite
Performances
Aynaz Raoufian, MFA Thesis | Performance FAB Gallery- Mal-memory is a two-year durational work tracing how the artist's memory has functioned since the loss of her sister, an act of preserving what remains, by writing. These three-hour performances are the final attempt to bring her memories back through others, in the hope that they might find their own along the way.
- Wednesday, October 21 | 1 - 4:30 p.m. & Saturday, October 24 | 12 - 3 p.m.
- LET’S BREAK THEM ALL | Growing up under a dictatorship, surrounded by rules, expectations, and values imposed on us, I learned that some things are meant to be questioned and sometimes, broken. I’m sure each of us has experienced this differently, depending on where and how we grew up.
- Join Mona Sahi for a durational performance on Wednesday, October 21 | 1 - 4:30 p.m. on the second floor of FAB Gallery. Come, take part, and share your experience. I invite you to break something with me.
- HOW DARK IT GETS WHEN WE COUNT IT TOGETHER | A durational performance and act of remembrance that refuses to let people’s lives be reduced to numbers. Through the repetitive act of counting, we will make these numbers visible, giving time and physical presence to the lives they represent.
- Join Mona Sahi on Saturday, October 24 | 12 - 3 p.m. Come and count with me.
Artists' Statements
Aynaz Raoufian
What I Made When My People Were Dying "explores memory, grief, and the ways our bodies and relationships hold experiences of illness. Nothing is more inclusive for humans on earth than loss; only its forms and intensity are different, while the imposition of death is something that is not equally shared. Drawing from the artist’s experience of caring for her sister with cancer, the works bring together durational performance, installation, sculpture, and interactive media to explore individual and collective experiences of care, memory, and survival. Visitors are invited to reflect on their own experiences and consider how personal histories connect to wider social and political realities."
Aynaz Raoufian is an interdisciplinary artist, MFA student in Intermedia, and PhD student in Medicine at the University of Alberta. Her practice emerges from her experience caring for her sister during cancer treatment. Her work examines care, memory, and the emotional weight that loss places on both the body and memory. Working across video, wearable sculptures, durational performances, and participatory installations, she explores how caring for another person reshapes identity and how multilingual expression complicates, and sometimes protects, the act of remembering. Through interactive works and installations that create spaces for collective reflection, she considers the body as a site of accumulation, where stories, emotions, and traces of care reside.
Mona Sahi
"This exhibition explores resistance, violence, and the experience of living with political uncertainty. Drawing on my experiences growing up in Iran and living abroad, I use materials to reflect on what is remembered, hidden, destroyed, and made visible. The works invite viewers to encounter these reflections through physical and sensory situations that can be unsettling, fragile, or difficult to ignore. Together, they ask us to consider how the suffering of others becomes visible to us, and what responsibility we have when we choose to look or look away."
Mona Sahi is an interdisciplinary artist and MFA student in Intermedia at the University of Alberta. She works across sculpture, installation, performance, sound, and video, with a practice rooted in material experimentation. She explores how objects, spaces, and sensory experiences can carry personal and collective histories. Drawing from her experiences growing up in Iran and living abroad, she is interested in the relationship between material, memory, place, and lived experience.
She Did What She Could
Samantha McLeish | MFA in Sculpture
November 3 - 21, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 5, 7 - 9 p.m.
(U of A faculty, staff, students and invited guests)
View the pdf E-vite
About the show
I feel like a stranger existing in my own body.
I feel like a stranger existing in my own body.
I feel like a stranger existing in my own body.
The transition from girlhood to womanhood is not an isolated or singular biological change; instead, it is the start of the mind's complete re-orientation from autonomous agency to the predetermined social expectations of femininity. As young as nine years old, girls are told that getting our first period means becoming a woman. For me, the association of being women is now framed around pain, embarrassment, and fear. I remember mourning the loss of my sense of self, my body, and the choices that I once had.
Through sculptural installation, printmaking, and textile based artwork, She Did What She Could explores the relationship between women's bodies and the societal structures that seek to define them. This work engages feminist theory, object theory, and concepts of bodily autonomy to examine the ways in which agency is affected by inherited gender expectations. The concept of the gendered obligations, specifically what is labeled as ‘women's roles’, are highlighted through the use of textiles and textile based practices. Textiles act as a symbol to a generational echo that links women centric spaces with their perspectives and lived experiences. It is through the lives of women where one can understand how intergenerational trauma can be interwoven and embodied within textiles. Fabric, fibre and thread start to become sites in which women are able to reclaim agency, assert their body autonomy and resist systemic oppression.
About the artist
Samantha McLeish is a Canadian-based artist currently completing the Master of Fine Art program specializing in sculpture at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Originally, McLeish is from Holland Landing, Ontario, where she developed her art practice into a combination of drawing/printmaking, textiles, ceramics and object making. McLeish’s research in her current graduate studies centres on women's lived experience, exploring her maternal lineage to examine how intergenerational trauma can be embedded within textile practices. Her work has been supported by the 2025-2026 Canada Graduate Scholarship - Masters (CGS M), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Underbelly
Maria Rosati | MFA in Printmaking
November 3 - 21, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 5, 7 - 9 p.m.
(U of A faculty, staff, students and invited guests)
View the pdf E-vite
About the show
Underbelly, whose title is a borrowed term describing the abdomen of an animal that is typically soft, vulnerable, and unprotected, investigates the relationship between the body and the inner-world of shame. Rooted in an autoethnographic narrative and positioned within critical fat studies, the exhibition traces Maria Rosati’s personal history of wrestling with the determined wrongness of her body and the correlation between fatness and morality. Using her body as a site for performance, understood through the language of printmaking, soft sculpture, craft as women’s work, and the combination of text and image, Rosati embraces the feminine, vulnerable, and monstrous. Rosati asks viewers to sit in their discomfort with care and tenderness, as she must in making the work, as a way of divorcing the shame we all hold toward our bodies to find liberation, empathy, and forgiveness.
About the artist
Maria Rosati is an artist and printmaker with a focus in silkscreen and textiles. Originally from Southern Ontario, she obtained her BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2023 and is completing her MFA in Printmaking at the University of Alberta. Positioned within critical fat studies, Rosati’s work looks at the intersection between fatness and internal shame-scapes. Rooted in an autoethnographic narrative, Rosati’s research traces her personal history of wrestling with her body and the expectations of womanhood she feels she has not met. Using her body as a site for performance, understood through the language of printmaking, soft sculpture, craft as women’s work, and the combination of text and image, she investigates tainted femininity and failure through the lens of fatness, morality, and girlhood. By using uncomfortable text, cropping, and tension in material and content, Rosati challenges the prominent discourse surrounding fat bodies through her work to find liberation and joy.
2026-2027 Exhibitions
FALL 2026
September 8 - October 3, 2026
Climates of Health: The Weather Inside Us
An International group exhibition with artworks by Sean Caulfield & Marilène Oliver, April Dean, Jonathan S. Green, Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau, Yoonmi Nam, Koichi Yamamoto, Ryuta Endo, Hisaharu Motoda, Hiroaki Oishi, Toshiya Takahama, Motohiro Tomii | With collaboration & research by Anne Hicks, Evan Davies, Aman Ullah, Candace Ramjohn & Joan Greer
October 13-24, 2026
What I Made When My People Were Dying
Aynaz Raofian and Mona Sahi | MFA Intermedia
Reception: Thurs. Oct. 15
November 3-21, 2026
MFA Thesis Exhibitions
Maria Rosatti & Samantha McLeish
Reception: Thurs. Nov. 5
December 1-19, 2026
MFA Thesis Exhibitions
Kate Bang & Carla Taylor
Reception: Thurs Dec 03
Visiting FAB Gallery
FAB Gallery Hours:
- Tuesday - Friday | 11a.m. - 5 p.m.
- Saturday | 12-3 p.m.
- Sunday & Monday | closed
Accessibility
FAB Gallery's second floor is now accessible via a barrier free entrance and ramp from the FAB/HUB pedway. Visitors should proceed to the gallery main entrance of FAB 1-01 first. Gallery staff will be pleased to provide second floor access upon request.
FAB Gallery Location:
1-1 Fine Arts Building
University of Alberta
112 Street and 89 Avenue