Orkideh Torabi, Bedroom Champion, 2025
Before books, there was the voice. Before the voice, there was the image held up in firelight, and someone standing before it, deciding where to look.
The Naqqāl, the Iranian oral storyteller, did not preserve stories by fixing them. Stories stayed alive because they changed, reshaped by each telling, each room, each particular silence in the audience. From this came the Pardeh-khān: a figure who stood before a painted canvas and moved the viewer's attention like water, deciding what to linger on, what to let go, how one wound connected to another. The image was never complete without that body standing beside it, narrating.
This is how I understand the act of curating. Not as the arrangement of finished meanings, but as a form of standing-beside. The works came to me first as images, encountered through the galleries representing the artists, through the slow accumulation of looking, and only later through research and language. The path did not pass through direct conversation with their makers. I came to them sideways, through the silence that exists between a work and its representation. Roland Barthes wrote that the death of the author is the birth of the reader, but perhaps what he meant is softer than it sounds. It is not that the artist disappears. It is that the work, once released into the world, becomes capable of meaning more than any single intention can hold.
We live now in a moment when images move faster than understanding. Stories are lifted from their sources, repeated through different mouths, transformed by the platforms that carry them. In this condition, choosing how to tell a story, choosing what to place next to what, is not a neutral act. The question of narration has become a question of ethics.
The exhibition unfolds across two rooms. Two pardehs. Each space is its own painted canvas. Each constructs its own world through the relationship between the works inside it, not through statement, but through proximity, friction, resonance.
PARDEH I: The Face and the Flesh
Orkideh Torabi and Ali Zakeri both look at men. They do not see the same thing. Torabi approaches from the side, through humor, through the exaggeration of Persian caricature and visual tradition. Her men perform. They are theatrical and emotionally fragile beneath their posturing, caught mid-gesture in the theater of their own authority. Zakeri's figures look powerful at first. But spend time with them and something else comes through: exhaustion, a heaviness that has nothing to do with muscle. His boxing scenes are not about sport. They are about what it takes to keep standing.
Placed together, these two bodies of work expose masculinity from opposite directions at once, one through the comedy of performance, one through the weight of endurance. The meaning of each shifts in the presence of the other.
PARDEH II: The Structure and the Flow
Parham Peyvandi builds walls. Not from hostility, but from memory, the memory of northern landscapes of Iran glimpsed behind architecture, of nature held at a distance by the lines of urban design. His spaces feel controlled, almost held in. Something outside is visible, but cannot be entered.
Shima Faridani dissolves them. Her paintings refuse the boundary between body and landscape, between interior and exterior, between what a form is and what it is becoming. Nothing in her work stays fixed long enough to be named. It is always in the process of turning into something else.
To stand between these two artworks, between Peyvandi's contained distance and Faridani's continuous becoming, is to feel the tension between wanting to hold the world still and knowing that it will not stay.
Like the Pardeh-khān standing before the painted canvas, this exhibition does not deliver conclusions. It stands beside the works and points. The meaning lives in the space between them, in the conversation between performance and vulnerability, structure and flow, the face we show and the flesh underneath. What the viewer carries out is their own.
This exhibition is a collaborative project between SARAI Gallery and Aabee Bleue Project, curated by Nirvana Parvizimotlagh.
