Exhibit: Haig Aivazian’s You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light

Contamporary Calgary: #701 11th Street SW, Calgary, AB, T2P 2C4

May 7—August 16, 2026

Who has the power to control light? In what ways can darkness be weaponized?

You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light (2022-ongoing) brings together three episodes of a cartoon mini-series by Haig Aivazian, building on his ongoing examination of the public administration of light and darkness as a policing tool.

Drawing on the history of public lighting, the work considers artificial light not just as a means for illuminating the streets at night, but as a mechanism of governance, where visibility underpins surveillance, authority, and the staging and enforcement of social order in public space.

Most civilizations have long understood the night as a realm of mystery. It belongs to creatures we have been trained to fear: gargoyles, vampires, and werewolves, lurking through the shadows. They inhabit the darkness, only to be banished by daylight – exposed, vilified, and cast as dangerous. But the night is also when we dream. Reality loosens its grip and other worlds begin to take shape. In dreams, regimes can falter, hierarchies dissolve, and new orders come into being – if only for a moment, before the day returns.

You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light is composed of fragments of found cartoons and animations from a wide range of sources, all meticulously redrawn, stitched together, and reanimated in collaboration with a team of animators in Beirut, with varying degrees of alteration to the original material. In this work, the night becomes fertile ground for upheaval and resistance, a space that allows for refuge and revolution, where efforts to take it over and colonize it are met with acts of subversive escapism and defiance.

The exhibition looks at both the street and the nightclub as sites of disruption, drawing parallels between dancing and protest as forms of communal resistance. But it also traces the moment when these gestures begin to fail – when dance, gathering, and dreaming are no longer sufficient to hold the weight of opposition. This moment demands that we consider the necessity of other modes of cultural production, ones that are capable of fighting – and ultimately undoing – the conditions that allow an oppressive world order to persist.

Here, we are faced with a threshold: prevailing systems are about to collapse, and new ones have yet to take shape. How can we reclaim power in the night?