Remnants for the Future

‘Remnants for the Future’ is a site-responsive textile installation that reflects on diasporic memory, inherited traditions, and cultural hybridity. Originally presented as a large-scale immersive sculpture, the work is composed of hand-knotted net structures using undyed natural fibers, embedded with organic copper fragments. These forms resemble clay vessels, stones, or charred remnants — evoking the domestic, the archaeological, and the ancestral.

‘Remnants for the Future’ considers how identity is shaped by what is carried, inherited, and reconstructed. In a former garment district, this installation becomes a poetic echo of labor histories — domestic and industrial, visible and obscured. It speaks to fragmentation and resilience, offering a slow, tactile counterpoint to the velocity of urban life just outside the window. Its porous, mesh-like surface mediates visibility — a metaphor for diasporic presence that is both seen and filtered through layers of history and place.

By situating craft-based materials within an urban context, the work bridges ancestral modes of making with contemporary environments. Viewers encounter a suspended moment of continuity and change — a quiet meditation on what endures, transforms, and is reimagined across generations.

Yana Rzayeva is an Azerbaijani-Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans textiles, painting, and installation. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design from OCAD University. Her practice explores diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and ancestral knowledge. Drawing from her personal diasporic experience and traditional Azerbaijani craft practices, she weaves together inherited memory with contemporary concerns around displacement, fragmentation, and belonging. Her work is grounded in sustainable materials and techniques passed down through generations.