Diyar Mayil
© Credits: Still Air (detail) by Diyar Mayil, photographed by Alberto Porro, 2025
Still Air — Diyar Mayil
Exhibition from April 11 to May 24, 2025
Opening reception on April 11th, from 5 to 8 PM
Conference on May 24, 2025 at 5 PM, reception starting at 4:30 PM
Still Air evokes the feeling of anticipation, which is marked both by waiting for something to happen and waiting for something not to happen — hope and fear intertwined together. Anchored in the reality of grievance, this work is situated in the hauntedness of everyday life. Physically starting from water infrastructure and spatially from architectural enclosures such as courtyards, this space offers a slowing of time and room for contemplation. The precariousness of everyday life is embedded into materials that can melt or seep away, evaporate into thin air. In the calmness of Still Air nothing is shaken nor remedied, only provoked by a wordless knowing. How to wait while pain and grief continuously seep into normalcy? How to sit with an invisible weight on the most mundane, seemingly unrelated acts and objects of everyday life? In this moment when the overwhelming weight of information creates numbness, the ordinary becomes absurd. Through the interplay of dualities such as familiar and strange, public and private, real and unreal, Still Air engages with the intimacy of the political, an exploration of the personal consequences of public events as they unfold.
© Credits: Diyar Mayil photographed by Alberto Porro, 2025
Diyar Mayil is an artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. Her work addresses issues of comfort, discomfort, adaptation and the acceptance of different bodies in public and private contexts. She is the laureate for the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2022) and the recipient of the Liz Crockford Award (2023). Her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec Conseil des arts de Montréal and has recently been shown at Whitney ISP, Circa Art Actuel, Centre Clark and NARS Foundation. She holds a BFA and MFA from Concordia University. Originally from Istanbul, she now lives and works in Montréal.
Still Air
Exhibition Text by Ramzi Nimr - April 3, 2025
I don’t remember how long I’ve been sitting here with you. In fact, I don’t remember anything at all before we were sitting here. Here, in this space, recognizable but not familiar—and suddenly made strange—we were trying to get our bearings. As if the place was speaking in a voice we knew, but a language we did not understand.
I don’t remember when meaning arrived. Were we looking away, focusing on something else? Did it creep up on us? Maybe it was dripping, irregularly, from the ceiling—a leak, a sign of a failure to contain, the loss of a boundary. But not traumatic, or too soon, or too much. Too slow, maybe, or perceptible only after the fact, like a stranger snuck into a house. I think we can agree, in any case, that it didn’t come through the front door. Maybe it was just an irritant: a small stone in your shoe, or a grain of sand in your eye. Something that didn’t sit right. Maybe it was the reason you were constantly shifting in your seat.
What were we thinking about, exactly? I was thinking about a sense of disorder; you were thinking about a sense of unity. We were both right, if we agree with the idea that coherence has as much to do with what is out there as our impression of it. That’s it really—we weren’t interested in theory, or anything else around which language patrols the borders. Neither of us were representatives of a particular point of view. We were just speaking, building something together without ground or ceiling, taking each other’s authority for granted.
It was curious the way that nothing seemed to move.
The stillness of the air was, to us, both respite and ill omen. As if we were waiting for something to happen, or not to happen, or feeling relief that something wasn’t happening. In the stillness, was something lingering, or was it perpetually arriving? To find consonance with the logic of what exists, we would always have to choose.
There is a mean streak in the world, hostile to the idea of a question without an answer. (Is there anything but this mean streak, in the end?) But to think in terms of only one thing struck us as a kind of violence. To refuse to choose is one kind of intervention—to learn to hate the conditions that compel us to answer is another.
Only moments from this conversation are available to recollection. A fragment: you asked if the need was greater to think of paradise in times of despair, or, instead, if it was more desirable to retreat into this life, this world, and find something habitable about it. Another fragment: I asked if there must always be an infinite distance between expectation and reality. What is it we were presuming to find?
Finally, a question that might be answered: not this.
Here, in the not this, there exists a feeling somewhere in the pendulum swing between awe and horror, which ever so briefly brings all other feeling to its knees. It happens in that very moment when we consider the very simple proposition that the world did not have to be this way. When we stop to ask: why? Why must it take so little for us to conjure a picture of Hell from what we already know? Why have we all become experts on loss?
Losing, it seems, has become a daily practice. Forgetting alongside it. Unable to keep up with losing’s pace, much of what gets lost seems to slip through our hands into a place far beyond forgetting, into oblivion. We went back and forth, wondering together what forms of inventory, of documenting this loss, might be invented to resist that habit, if such forms exist. Forms that do not lead to catharsis, which is itself an art of losing. Forms that force us to sit with the pain.
Still, this does nothing to answer the question that has always been there, buried deep in our chests: is it possible, ultimately, to recover what has been lost?
A final fragment: an answer wasn’t clear—but we agreed, you and I, that we can still refuse to give up on the idea that, despite all evidence to the contrary, something might be changed. That lives might be made just a fraction better. That we might stretch the duration of a moment in which something might be done. In that moment, we might conceive of other, less rigid infrastructures—ones that can be broken in case of emergency. Infrastructures that are never final, and which speak directly to some deeper need.
Infrastructures that carry water.
Lost in thought, I don’t remember how the conversation ended.
Acknowledgements
Diyar Mayil would like to thank: Articule, Mojeanne Behzadi, Léah Bellefleur-Gauthier, Oguzhan Cesur, Jules Desbiens, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Monique Deschamps, Aurelie Guillaume, Kelly Jazvac, Irem Karaaslan, Maria Khoury, Tegan Moore, Ramzi Nimr, Brendon O’Neill, Alberto Porro, Fayez Sharabaty, Evan Snow, Kevin Teixeira, Benoit Therrien, Feyza Goksu Yuksel, Liz Xu.
Artist acknowledges the support of Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and De Gaspé Furniture with gratitude.
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page.
Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events