Hir o Vir takes its title from a Persian expression denoting a state of productive disorder: that moment of instability in which forms have not yet found coherence, yet something is already in the process of coming into being.
The exhibition draws on this liminal condition to bring into dialogue Laila Tara H and Monir Farmanfarmanian, a major figure of Iranian modern art whose work has had a lasting international resonance—two generations of women artists brought together around fragmentary questions of memory, despite highly structured formal languages. Between geometric forms set into recursive mise en abyme through repetition and evanescent images the eye struggles to hold onto, artisanal precision and intuitive emergence coexist. Hir o Vir explores the tensions between order and dispersion, permanence and alteration—in the sense of decline, deterioration, even gradual withering. The exhibition proposes a suspended space in which the image never appears as a stable given, but rather as the provisional outcome of an ongoing process of recomposition and decomposition.
One form runs throughout the exhibition: the ball. An elemental figure, it appears suspended in a state of indeterminacy from which narrative tension emerges even before the story itself has taken shape. Neither entirely falling nor wholly still, Laila Tara H’s works—whether blind memory drawings constructed around a collection of stamps, paper compositions suggestive of dressmaking patterns, or suspended bronze spheres—establish a temporality of anticipation, shaped by suspension and suspense. A suspended triptych of forms evoking the kaftan appears by turns diaphanous, fragile, and reflective through the use of gampi paper, hemp paper, and polished steel, oscillating between sketch, garment, relic, and apparition.

Courtesy Parand Danesh