Statement:

In 1961, America sent the first hominid into space. The passenger on this historic journey was not a brave human, but a small chimpanzee named “Ham.”

In the context of the Cold War’s arms race and political rivalry, this journey was recorded in history as a symbol of the victor’s superiority and the realization of humanity’s long-held desire to dominate the world and conquer nature. ///

This experience and its reflection in Ham’s mind or body were never transmitted. He was the first mammal to, albeit involuntarily, touch the vast expanse of space and experience the encounter with Earth from a new perspective.

The exhibition “Ham,” with a look at this historical moment and the surrounding questions, seeks to explore what was formed in the minds of early humans in relation to the sky. Did they, when gazing at the blue dome, ever think of traveling to the heavens?

Could they imagine the Earth from a distance and through a different perspective? In this way, the exhibition invites the viewer to see through the eyes of another – the other of Ham or early humans. In this exhibition, works by artists from different generations have been brought together to create a space between the artwork and the viewer.

Through this coexistence, diverse perspectives and viewpoints invite the viewer to “imagine a new experience from another’s perspective.”

Mehrnoush Kamand

"Man presence, the concept of anything as ‘art’ becomes as futile and meaningless as imagining an ocean without water. Art only takes shape at the crossroads of the subject’s transition from the cultural world to the lived world.

This happens when the creator’s experiences of time or space influence their relationship with others or their understanding of material objects, and they schematically formulate it as an aesthetic or purely physical object.

There is a dialectical relationship between the artist’s mind and the external world, but first and foremost, there is a turn towards the creator as a human subject who, through the medium of art, is transformed into an objective work.

The lived world, as something experienced intuitively and directly in the depths of existence, only takes shape with/in the world through human effort. Therefore, art is only a reflection of the framework of the creator’s consciousness.

If art reveals something that we often do not see, it is undoubtedly the truth that lies behind the material substance of the work, waiting to be revealed. These are the uncertain gaps or unclear voids that are filled again by the reader’s interpretation of the work.

Based on this belief, all this takes shape in the eyes of the human subject, regardless of the perspective they adopt, from the deepest depths of the earth to the highest points of space that human feet and eyes have reached and gazed upon.

Art is the place where truth is manifested to humanity through beauty. To project it onto anything other than humanity is a mistake."

Hamidreza Karami