What can we dream into actuality? The newly commissioned and current artworks on this exhibition usually mix conventional parts of Iranian tradition with creativeness and provocation to supply emancipatory views on id and gender.

A multimedia set up recalling the Saghi, a younger cupbearer boy with female magnificence, conveys a dismantled embodiment. In a sequence of images, the self captured towards intensifying public settings transforms into resilient wildflowers rising in harsh circumstances as metaphoric reflections of violent restraining mechanisms. Discovered cinema footage is stitched with authentic textual content to disclose the bounds of illustration set by regulatory our bodies. New media strategies utilizing textiles reproduce the portray of an embracing couple the place gender binaries are blurred to counter erasures. Archival sounds and revolutionary chants create a soundscape of echoing hopes for liberated futures. A sculpture materialised from a dream of a sacred tree draped with hair references abject and divine femininity. Glazed ceramic items, rooted in ancestral crafts, discover ongoing feminist struggles and encourage a shift from anger and grief in the direction of radical pleasure.

Curated by
Yalda Bidshahri

Collaborating artists:
Dorsa Asadi, Chupan Atashi, Gisou Golshani, Fatemeh Kazemi, Lilian Nejatpour, Niloofar Taatizadeh, Maryam Tafakory

at Bayt AlMamzar, Dubai
till October twelfth, 2024