Join CAG’s Assistant Curator Aretha Pereira for a walkthrough of the current exhibitions, *Nour Mobarak: Bubonic Mnemonic* and *Leslie Thornton: Peggy & Fred in Hell*.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.


Black and white still from Peggy & Fred In Hell of a cluttered interior with a chair and a desk. A grid overlays the entire image.

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with Aretha Pereira

Curatorial Tour

Nour Mobarak

Nour Mobarak’s practice gives unexpected form to a career-long concern with the conditions of being. In work spanning sculpture, sound, performance, and moving image, the artist considers the ways that systems — physical, political and otherwise — form, entangle and mutate over time. She frequently draws on the principles of avant-garde music and poetry in her works, engaging questions of voice, knowledge, and inheritance through strategies such as rhythm, improvisation and self-imposed parameters. Her unconventional use of materials such as mycelium and resin extends directly from these impulses, embodying an interest in both discovering a material’s physical properties through making and allowing its idiosyncratic behaviours to shape her work in surprising ways.

In *Bubonic Mnemonic*, Mobarak turns her attention to the body as both system and carrier — a visceral technology and humanity’s earliest archive. With a longstanding interest in oral cultures, where memorized tropes and motifs have often served as mnemonics to carry knowledge, she reflects here on the role of the cliché in cognition. Working with familiar images, familial connections, as well as her own form — casts of her pregnant torso, impressions of her buttocks, a video of her vocal cords — she asks how knowledge takes form and is stored, how memory is drawn and redrawn by time, circumstance and lineage.

### Biography
Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works between Bainbridge Island, WA and Athens, Greece. Her recent presentations include the 2026 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 2026 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudi Arabia; WIELS, Brussels (2025); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2025); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024-25); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Turin (2024), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023); California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2024); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2022). Her performances have been staged at venues such as the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019), LAXART, Los Angeles (2019), Stadslimeit, Antwerp (2016), and Cambridge University, UK (2010), amongst many others.

Artwork by Nour Mobarak made of bright yellow and dark red resin poured into a clear rectangular frame.

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Bubonic Mnemonic

Leslie Thornton

For more than five decades, Leslie Thornton has cultivated an artistic practice anchored in time, working fluidly across film, video and installation. Combining her own camerawork with a range of archival media, Thornton is known for bringing a disparate array of styles, techniques and references into a synchronous whole, exploring themes spanning the anxiety of conflict, the culture of science, and the space between thought and language.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Thornton presents *Peggy and Fred in Hell: Folding* (1983-2015), the final iteration of her serial work filmed and edited over the course of thirty years. The film follows two children wandering through a strange landscape marked by the detritus of television, popular culture and industrialization, an uncertain place tempered by Thornton’s own Cold War childhood. 

Operating as a bridge between late 20th-century anxieties and the contemporary explosion of information technologies, the work turns a critical eye to technology’s potential to outpace human comprehension and control. In the fiction of the film, where Peggy and Fred appear to be raised solely by television, their invented world deteriorates into a disjointed data field, nodding to the ways that language, knowledge and culture are fractured and restructured in a rapidly changing world.

### Biography
Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, Tennessee) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and screenings include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Lightcone, Paris; MoMA, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Tate Modern, London; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg; Malmö Konsthall, Malmö and Secession, Vienna. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Harvard University, Cambridge; Museum of Modern Art, New York; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Thornton trained at MIT (1976) and at Harvard University (1974). She holds an MFA from The Hartford Art School (1976), a BFA from SUNY Buffalo, (1973), and was a mathematics major at Tufts University (1969–1971).

Black and white still from Peggy & Fred In Hell showing a young boy in a white coat looking at a pile of objects in the foreground.

Curatorial Tour

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