LOOP 2025
Leila Zelli, World premiere: Each Street Tells The Story of a Fearless Women, 2025, video, color, sound, 20 min 30 s. With the assistance of Jean-Philippe Thibault for production and sound design
In this 20-minute video, a juxtaposition of present and past sheds light on women's timeless struggles for freedom. The work features an antique frieze depicting the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons - female warriors that some historians interpret as representations of the Persians opposing the Greeks, and who at the time were designated as the Others: the enemies, the barbarians, the weak.
An association is made between these antique figures and contemporary Iranian women, whose fight for freedom is expressed, among other ways, through the movement of their bodies in public spaces-by dancing and engaging in athletic actions. Their weapons are their mobile phones, which capture and share these actions on social media, creating new representations and new meanings of daily courage and strength.
At times, we glimpse the silhouettes of women and screens opening here and there among the sculpted forms of the warrior bodies in bas-relief. The soundtrack is a composition that combines the original sounds of clips published on social media with audio fragments from analysts and historians who are Amazon specialists. Zelli's work thus questions the complexity of imagined identities, between myth and reality.
Born in Tehran (Iran), Leila Zelli works in Montréal. MFA (2020) from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Zelli is interested in the relationship that we have with the ideas of "others" and "elsewhere" and more specifically within this geopolitical space often referred to by the questionable term "Middle East." Her work has been shown, among others, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and at the Toronto Biennial (2024). Her videos are in the permanent collections of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. She is the laureate of the 2023 Prix Lynne-Cohen and the 2021 winner of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. About Dam and Hofit (2022), a film co-created with Gali Blay, was honored at the Athens Animfest and screened internationally.