Roda Medhat
Things I Can Fold, Deflate, and Break
“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 Art Gallery of Burlington’s (AGB) 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. In this way, his works become speculative archives, weaving forgotten or oversimplified histories into forms that are pliant, luminous, and resolutely alive.
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. Flickering lights, low hums from inflatable fans, and tactile shifts from wool to plastic produce a multisensory choreography that guides the viewer through Roda’s world.
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.
Meet the
artist
Roda Medhat
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 such as Fuzzy Thinking, CAFKA, The Shape I’m In, Impart (Centre[3]), REVIVE, Surfacing (Abbozzo Gallery), and From Electrical Fire Spirits May Be Kindled. 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 has been sponsored by the Partners In Art. The Art Gallery of Burlington is supported by the City of Burlington, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Trillium Foundation. The AGB’s learning programming has been sponsored by The Burlington Foundation, The Joyce Family Foundation, and the incite Foundation for the Arts.
The AGB is grateful to the volunteer Gallery Guides for their exemplary dedication to bringing the exhibition to life and to our members for their ongoing support of all the AGB’s programming.
