Hir o Vir takes its title from a Persian expression referring to a state of productive disorder: that moment of instability when forms have not yet found their coherence, yet something is already in the process of emerging.

The exhibition draws upon this liminal condition to bring into dialogue Laila Tara H and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, a major figure of modern Iranian art whose work has resonated internationally for decades. Across two generations of women artists, fragmented memories encounter highly structured formal systems. Geometric forms multiplied through repetition coexist with fleeting images that the eye struggles to retain; artisanal precision meets intuitive emergence. Hir o Vir explores the tensions between order and dispersion, permanence and alteration (in the sense of decline, deterioration, or even disintegration). The exhibition proposes a suspended space in which the image never appears as a stable given, but rather as the provisional result of an ongoing process of composition and decomposition.

One form runs throughout the exhibition: the ball. An elemental figure, it appears suspended in a state of indeterminacy from which a narrative tension emerges even before any story has been articulated. Neither entirely falling nor completely still, Laila Tara H’s works, whether memory drawings built around a collection of stamps, paper compositions reminiscent of garment patterns, or bronze marbles, establish a temporality of anticipation, shaped by suspension and suspense. A suspended triptych of forms evoking the kaftan is by turns diaphanous, fragile and reflective through its use of gampi paper, hemp paper and polished steel, oscillating between sketch, garment, relic and apparition.

Associated with childhood and play as much as movement and impact, the sphere becomes here an ambiguous object: both intimate and monumental, vulnerable and emotionally charged. Deployed through a material vocabulary combining graphite, paper, steel, brass and bronze, it simultaneously evokes the gesture of drawing, an industrial memory, and regimes of erasure and reflection. In turn, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mirrored work initiates and extends this dialogue. Constructed through a rigorous system of repetitions, symmetries and permutations, it generates an order whose stability always remains relative. The longer one looks, the more its forms seem to multiply, shift and produce new configurations. Where Laila Tara H reconstructs the image from fragments of memory, Monir generates disturbance from a structure that appears perfectly ordered. Presented on a low pedestal recalling the howz, the interior pools found in traditional Iranian domestic architecture, the work functions as a fragile point of equilibrium around which the exhibition articulates its relationships to time, perception and the recomposition of images. Its reflection projects onto the ceiling like luminous ripples across the surface of still water, while the red elements dispersed throughout the composition introduce a subtle disruption into the geometric framework. Like a fractal pattern unfolding from a single point of origin, they suggest the silent propagation of an impact whose reverberations continue to spread long after the event itself has passed.

Hir o Vir presents a dialogue displaced across time and space between two practices that each interrogate, through distinct yet interconnected visual languages, the fragile construction of memory in image form, that instant before impact resounds, before the alarm sounds, before the ground begins to tremble. Where Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s geometric rigor, mirrored surfaces and repetition produce an apparently stable order traversed by internal complexities and fragmentary effects, Laila Tara H’s practice unfolds as a singular exploration of contemporary craft through a form of neo-miniaturism in which technical precision and mnemonic failure inevitably coexist. Drawing upon techniques inherited from Persian traditions and relocating them within a deeply personal language, her work brings forth images from fragments, memories, deliberately incomplete forms and suspended architectures oscillating between garment, relic and apparition. The detail of motifs, figures, letters and fields of colour speaks less of demonstrative virtuosity than of an active principle of doubt. In other words, a continual attempt to deconstruct and reconstruct the architecture of memory.

Courtesy of Parand Danesh