Festival Art Souterrain
Exhibition place
Activities
Offrande au safran (2025)
Performance and paint on paper
Offrande au safran is a performative and installative work where memory, migration and sorority are intertwined through matter and gesture. Inspired by the words of the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, Farzaneh and Mancy Rezaei evoke feminine kinship by combining poetry, song and family transmission. At the heart of the project, saffron, cultivated artisanally by their family in Mahabad, Iran, becomes a pigment, an offering and a precious symbol.
Using saffron,Farzaneh paints fine and organic lines where female bodies emerge, like shoots crossing a fertile land. Her drawings evoke displacement, taking root and invisible links between territories. Mancy, with watercolor and black ink, affirms the presence of the female body in public spaces by merging organic silhouettes and architectural patterns from mixed cultures. Together, the sisters create a sensitive space, celebrating the power of being together and rooted in intimate memory and collective affirmation.
In the days following the performances, the public will be able to contemplate the traces left by their ritual gestures, which will continue to inhabit the space.
Biography
Farzaneh and Mancy Rezaei are two Iranian-Canadian sisters and visual artists, who have been based in Montreal since 2014. Recipients of master’s degrees in Visual and Media Arts from the University of Quebec in Montréal (2020–2021), they develop distinct but complementary practices, united by a reflection on immigration, identity, memory, the representation of the female body, and resilience. Both also work as museum mediators at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Mancy explores the presence of women’s bodies in private and public spaces, echoing issues of censorship and control in Iran. Farzaneh questions the introspective and paradoxical dimensions of the migratory experience.
Offrande au safran was presented for the first time at Orange in 2025, but they had previously presented several duo projects, notably at Projet Casa in 2024, at the Maison de la culture NDG and at the Maison des artistes francophones in Winnipeg in 2025.