Based on Real Events
Exhibition Statement, Aaran Projects Gallery (2022)

I wrote this exhibition text for multimedia artist, Nastaran Safaei’s solo show Based on Real Events, presented at Aaran Projects Gallery in Tehran, Iran. The work emerged out of a period of rupture in the artist’s life, a temporary departure from home, her studio, and from a sense of continuity. I was drawn to the way she used that interruption as raw material, building an intimate, yet fragmented language out of absence, memory, and bodily trace.

In writing this piece, I wanted to stay close to the tone of the work itself: nonlinear, reflective, and unresolved. I combined elements of poetic narrative and critical framing, letting the text mirror the emotional and material logic of the exhibition. It’s less a conventional essay than a companion, something that sits beside the work without explaining it away.