The Book of Roaring Memories

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 11, 6-8pm at Open Studio

Mohammad Tabesh is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture and installation, creative writing, and printmaking. In The Book of Roaring Memories, Tabesh gathers anonymous oral memories from the Iranian diaspora shaped by war, violence, censorship, and displacement, translating them into poetic prose and colour-based print works.

Using letterpress debossing and coloured pencil, Tabesh creates varied-edition prints that explore the relationship between memory, language, and colour. His red-green colour blindness shapes his approach to colour, leading him to work through careful selection, documentation, and systems of reference rather than visual certainty.

Each text in The Book of Roaring Memories is identified only by age markers, preserving anonymity while holding the tension between past experience and present memory. The project explores collective memory and oral history, considering how colour appears within recollection as a sensory trace of lived experience, and how oral histories preserve and transmit memory.

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Mohammad Tabesh is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture and installation, creative writing, and printmaking. He holds a BFA in Sculpture/Installation from OCAD University.

The Book of Roaring Memories is a work in progress. The artist gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Access Copyright Foundation