Statement:

Hir o Vir takes its title from a Persian expression denoting a state of productive disorder: that moment of instability in which forms have not yet found coherence, yet something is already in the process of coming into being.

The exhibition draws on this liminal condition to bring into dialogue Laila Tara H and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, a major figure of Iranian modern art whose work has had a lasting international resonance—two generations of women artists brought together around fragmentary questions of memory, despite highly structured formal languages.

Between geometric forms set into recursive mise en abyme through repetition and evanescent images the eye struggles to hold onto, artisanal precision and intuitive emergence coexist.

Hir o Vir explores the tensions between order and dispersion, permanence and alteration—in the sense of decline, deterioration, even gradual withering. ///

The exhibition proposes a suspended space in which the image never appears as a stable given, but rather as the provisional outcome of an ongoing process of recomposition and decomposition.

One form runs throughout the exhibition: the ball. An elemental figure, it appears suspended in a state of indeterminacy from which narrative tension emerges even before the story itself has taken shape.

Neither entirely falling nor wholly still, Laila Tara H’s works—whether blind memory drawings constructed around a collection of stamps, paper compositions suggestive of dressmaking patterns, or suspended bronze spheres—establish a temporality of anticipation, shaped by suspension and suspense.

A suspended triptych of forms evoking the kaftan appears by turns diaphanous, fragile, and reflective through the use of gampi paper, hemp paper, and polished steel, oscillating between sketch, garment, relic, and apparition.

Associated equally with childhood and play as with movement and impact, the sphere becomes here an ambiguous object: at once intimate and monumental, vulnerable and affectively charged.

Developed through a material vocabulary combining graphite, paper, steel, brass, and bronze, it simultaneously invokes the gesture of drawing, an industrial memory, and regimes of erasure and reflection.

In turn, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s faceted mirrored sphere initiates and extends this dialogue.

Between trace and permanence, opacity and reflection, this form acts as a centre of gravity around which the exhibition articulates its relationship to time, movement, and memory.

Hir o Vir reveals a dialogue displaced across time and space between two practices that each interrogate, through distinct yet interconnected languages, the fragile construction of memory as image, at that precise instant before impact erupts, the alarm signal resounds, the ground begins to tremble.

Where Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s geometric rigour, mirrors, and repetition produce an apparently stable order, traversed by internal complexities and fragmentary disruptions, Laila Tara H’s gesture unfolds as a singular exploration of contemporary craft through a form of neo-miniaturism in which technical precision and mnemonic failure inevitably coexist.

Drawing on techniques inherited from Persian traditions, which she reconfigures into a deeply personal visual language, her work allows images to emerge from fragments, memories, deliberately incomplete forms, and suspended architectures oscillating between garment, relic, and apparition.

The detail of motifs, figures, letters, and planes of colour speaks less to demonstrative virtuosity than to a principle of active doubt —in other words, to a continual attempt to dismantle and reconstruct the architecture of memory.