Statement:

Maryam Majd Art Projects (MMAP), in collaboration with Pejman Foundation: Argo Factory, presents “Curtain Call”, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Raoof Dashti.

Marking his fifth solo show, the exhibition features three video works and eighteen photographs that draw on the visual language of theater to examine identity, visibility, and personal narrative within regulated cultural frameworks.

Rooted in Raoof’s background in theater, “Curtain Call” continues his practice of staging objects to imply human presence without direct representation, using meticulously composed scenes to evoke narrative and emotion.///

Building on the trajectory of “Dis-Orientation” (2021), where he began drawing more explicitly from personal experience, this body of work moves further toward abstraction and introspection.

Raoof began working on “Curtain Call” by returning to theaters where he had performed as a child. Over the course of a year and a half, he revisited halls across Iran—in cities like Mashhad, Qazvin, Quchan and Tehran.

These once-familiar spaces became sites for reflection and image-making.

Photographing drawn curtains, silent seating areas, and bouquets left behind—traces of past performances—this process allowed him to confront personal experiences through visual form. The resulting works stem from this act of return and re-staging.

Raoof’s return to theater spaces reflects broader psychological and social tensions. His works capture moments of suspension, between concealment and exposure, which he frames as psychosomatic states, where personal anxiety intersects with social constraint: the same anxiety he once felt in the moments before, during, and after performing, fearing the possibility of overexposure.

At the core of “Curtain Call” is the curtain—both a theatrical element and a conceptual boundary between visibility and concealment.

It marks the tension between the imaginary and real, public and private, exposure and restraint. In Raoof’s work, the curtain becomes a psychological threshold, evoking vulnerability and self-confrontation.

Due to his socio-political approach, the curtain also takes on a symbolic role, separating the outside world from the inside—a division between collective realities and the intimate self.

The body of work in “Curtain Call”, as in his other works, is best understood as a series rather than as individual frames.

Presented through both video and photography, the works are unified by recurring motifs and a consistent spatial logic, forming a cohesive narrative that encourages the viewer to engage with the entire body of work across multiple mediums, tones, and visual languages.