A Minaret for the General’s Wife, an art installation by visual studies lecturer Erdem Taşdelen, is now on display at Toronto's Mercer Union — at least, in theory. Although the west-end art gallery is currently closed to the public (for obvious reasons), there is a way to view Taşdelen's art without leaving home.

Taşdelen worked with Mercer Union to create a brief video walkthrough of the exhibition. In the video, he explains how he was inspired to delve into the history of a mysterious 19th-century minaret, located in a small city in Lithuania. The stories he discovered — a factual one about a Russian general and a probably-apocryphal one about the general's Turkish lover — formed the basis of a narrative, which Taşdelen embodied in a collection of interrelated writing and found objects.

"In A Minaret for the General’s Wife, the minaret becomes a metaphor for that peculiar and potent feeling of being corporeally out of place, for structures built in locations where they seemingly don’t belong, and for objects brought out of context," Mercer Union writes in its description of the exhibition.

Taşdelen's video walkthrough is embedded above. And it can also be viewed on the Mercer Union website.