Statement:

Dastan:Outside presents "Birth", a solo exhibition by Mamali Shafahi. [Focus Room 04] takes place near Dastan’s Basement on West Maryam Street, after Raz Alley. The exhibition opens on Friday, August 21, 2026, and remains on view through September 11.

In “Birth,” ending and beginning are not treated as separate states, but as two sides of a continuous movement.

The exhibition extends the trajectory that Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht have traced through absence, passage, and imagined afterlives, returning this journey to its point of origin: a beginning.///

The works unfold through fragments—a gesture, a touch, an animal, a landscape, or an echo of desire and fear—detached from chronological time and placed alongside one another, as if different moments of a life had been gathered within the same body.

Like memory, the works reconstruct life not as a continuous narrative but as a collection of scattered intensities: fragments of the past that remain present within a new state.

This logic extends into the spatial construction of the exhibition. Red spreads from the surfaces of the works to the curtains, windows, and floor of the gallery, transforming the space into an immersive, almost bodily interior.

Emerging among the folds of red fabric, the works occupy a space somewhere between a room, a stage, and a body, appearing as traces surfacing through a shared skin and momentarily holding together fragments of different times and lives.

The gallery becomes both an interior and a threshold—a place one enters as if returning to somewhere before the formation of memory.

“Birth” completes the circle without reaching a definitive end. What began as a meditation on disappearance returns as an act of becoming.