Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) is pleased to announce the exhibition Things I Can Fold, Deflate, and Break by Roda Medhat, opening January 17, 2026, and running until April 26, 2026. The public opening reception will take place at the AGB on Saturday, January 17 from 1 – 3pm.

Roda Medhat, Hanging Kilim (right), Blue Totem on Red (left), 2025, Acrylic, LED neon, 8 x 1.5 ft. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

“When you find different materials, you want to tell different stories.” With this deceptively simple assertion, Markham-based, Kurdish-born artist Roda Medhat situates material not merely as a medium but a narrative engine. Roda’s work operates in the fertile space where craft, memory, and digital fabrication intersect, and where materials such as soft wool, buoyant inflatable vinyl, and glowing neon each carry their own cultural meanings. The AGB’s winter 2026 season marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in a public institution, offering a sensory playground where textiles and sculptures act as storytellers.

As someone who lived between cultures, migrating at a young age, Roda’s practice emerged from the intersections of generation and place. Roda is interested in how diasporic memory operates, how war and media spectacle shape collective memory, and how to reclaim erased or overlooked narratives by folding, deflating, and breaking them. Roda draws from a constellation of sources from archival texts to children’s stories and vernacular architecture to the geometric language of West Asian and Kurdish textiles.

Things I Can Fold, Deflate, and Break splits the gallery in thirds, diving into distant modes of light, sound, and movement, resulting in a unified environment in which material and narrative coexist and merge through one another.

The exhibition title, simple and playful, serves as a reflection of how the space itself changed with Roda’s work—folding, deflating / inflating, and bending materials—these gestures extend beyond physical manipulation as they mirror the ways he reshapes narrative itself. Through repositioning and replanting source material, teasing apart small elements and details, Roda allows stories to fold into one another (both materially and metaphorically), braiding their meanings back again into the larger plot.

Roda Medhat is a Markham-based artist whose work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. His recent solo exhibition Serdem was presented at CIBC Square, Toronto, in 2024–2025. In 2025, his work appeared widely across the Greater Toronto Area in exhibitions. His practice also extended into public-facing cultural programming through Hidden in Plain Sight, a rooftop inflatable sculpture commission for Ontario Culture Days. In addition to gallery-based projects, Roda’s work featured in interdisciplinary settings including the Tall Pines Music & Arts Festival.

Roda is the 2023 recipient of the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Prize and was awarded the CIBC C² Art Prize in 2024. His temporary and permanent public artworks have been exhibited and installed in cities across Canada. He holds a BFA from OCAD University, studied film production at FAMU in Prague, and is currently completing his MFA at the University of Guelph.

Things I Can Fold, Deflate, and Break is generously sponsored by Partners In Art. The Art Gallery of Burlington is supported by the City of Burlington and Ontario Arts Council.

Public Programming

At the AGB, learning is in the making. Learn more about the programs and register.

Making Patterns with Natural Dyes and Resists
With Akash Inbakumar
Thursdays, March 12 – 26, 6 – 9pm

Digital Rug Making
With Shaheer Zazai
Thursday, February 19, 1 – 3pm (online)

Navigating Process and Practice
With Jude Abu Zaineh
Thursday, March 5, 6:30 – 8pm

Contemporary Art Bus Tour
With Textile Museum of Canada and Art Gallery of Mississauga
Sunday, February 1, 12 – 5pm

Upcoming Exhibition

Phuong Nguyen, Planche LXX, Mixed Media (Oil on panel, ceramic sculpture, crepe ribbon), 36″ x 24″ x 5″, 2025. Photo: Greg McCarthy.

Phuong Nguyen
“she died a death by a thousand cuts”
January 31 – May 17, 2026

On view January 31 – May 17, 2026, in the Perry Gallery, Toronto-based artist Phuong Nguyen’s “she died a death by a thousand cuts” presents a haunting meditation on colonialism, cultural appropriation, and the spectral afterlives of objects. Through painting, weaving, wood carving, and ceramics, Nguyen reimagines figures and motifs drawn from Chinoiserie and the French colonial-era publication L’Art à Hué (1919), exposing the ways these archives aestheticized, exoticized, and controlled Vietnamese cultural narratives for Western audiences. Her richly layered works built from thrifted textiles, reclaimed ceramics, carved frames, and newly developed clay components, collapse the boundaries between animate and inanimate forms, conjuring peri-human presences that resist the violences of fetishization and erasure. Drawing inspiration from feminist critiques of Chinoiserie, Nguyen transforms ornamental surface into a site of reckoning, where tender acts of translation, care, and material repair offer pathways toward reclaiming agency and reanimating histories long subjected to a “death by a thousand cuts.”

About the AGB
The Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) delivers thought-provoking exhibitions, learning opportunities, and public programs in downtown Burlington – sparking meaningful connections for people to learn, see, think, and make. The AGB is a dynamic space where art, community, and culture converge and share in the wealth of human creativity. The Gallery is home to the largest collection of contemporary Canadian ceramics globally. We recognize that this land belongs to the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and express gratitude for their stewardship.

Accessibility Information
The AGB is wheelchair accessible, and wheelchairs are available for loan within the Gallery space. The Lakeshore and Brock Lobby entrances are equipped with automatic doors. Ramps facilitate access throughout the Gallery, and an elevator is available for access to the second level studios. The AGB ceramic studios are partially accessible; please contact us with your requirements so we can accommodate access as required. Service animals are permitted in the Gallery. The Gallery has gender-neutral washrooms and upholds that everyone has the right to safe public washroom access.

Art Gallery of Burlington
1333 Lakeshore Road
Burlington, ON L7S 1A9
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