Another Birth

Statement: 

… ‘my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes’…

Forugh Farrokhzad

Another Birth is a group exhibition that brings together artists from Iran whose works negotiate the present state of affairs by tracing the paradoxes inherent within notions of corporeality and finitude. Exploring the ways in which oppressive conditions can alter our dialectic sense of being and becoming, this exhibition takes its title from Forugh Farrokhzad’s eponymous poem. When censorship is navigated as a generative set of constraints, symbols and metaphors arrive with intensified force.

Yet the poem’s blurring of the distinction between birth and death is no mere trope. Rather, it is a political reality. Accordingly, these artworks spin into the present moment, in which – as in the ecstatic dance’s dissociation from the body – the “still point of the turning” marks a simultaneous condition of belonging and displacement. In that sense, this exhibition offers a vision of transience as trance. While the question of what constitutes meaningful and purposeful modes of subversion remains, as ever, unresolved, a sense of hope resonates through these works, which seem to make themselves at home within – and speak from – an indeterminate space of becoming.

Address: UAE| Dubai | Jossa | warehouse 45