Laila Tara H, Loqmé, 2025, Site-specific installation, details. Photo: Corey Bartle-Sanderson. Courtesy of the artist and Hatch Gallery.
ASIA NOW 2025
Laila Tara H
Third Space - Site-Specific installation ‘Loqmé’
October 21 - 26, 2025
Monnaie de Paris
11 Quai Conti, 75006
For Asia Now Paris 2025, Laila Tara H presents Loqmé, a site-specific installation unfolding across the grand staircase at the Monnaie de Paris. Composed of a single monumental kaftan and a sound piece, Loqmé carries centuries of cultural and sartorial history from the Parthian to the Qajar periods, operating as a timeless form. The installation stages a theoretical place in which memory is held and cycles, exploring nationhood as a condition and interweaving historicism and the personal.
Situated at the top of the grand staircase, the kaftan is split into two sections through which visitors must pass to access the fair and the project presented on the upper floor. Its two halves articulate exterior display and interior residue, while the sound piece binds them into a single spatial argument. The fabric surface performs the nation through a bold, celebratory assemblage of reconstituted textiles, poulak-douzi embroidery, cut-outs, and sequined letters and bodies treated as semiotic forms. The paper surface serves as the documentary underside, composed of handmade papers, pre-revolutionary debt ledgers, newspaper cuttings, and volcanic pumice, marked with memory drawings, hieroglyphic letters, and miniature painted figures. Together, these facing conditions, public and ceremonial versus private and archival, establish the work as both passage and threshold.
The accompanying sound piece acts as a corridor between these registers, beginning with the steady rhythm of the tonbak before rising to a crescendo that abruptly breaks into layered field recordings from Tehran. It mirrors cycles of protest and upheaval in Iranian history, where relief and disorientation coexist, situating the installation within rhythms of continuity and rupture.
Loqmé constructs a hybrid material and conceptual language reflecting diasporic subjectivity. At its core lies the notion of a third nationality, a cultural identity without singular precedent, formed from transported histories, adopted narratives, and evolving personal positionings. The installation makes legible how presentation, record, and everyday life continually remake one another, forming the condition of nationhood.