“What House Now?”
Mirror, Aluminum and Wood, 44”x56”,2022, Collaboration with Nooshin Hakim.
The act of salvagement has always fascinated us. Āina-kāri-Awena Karî (Kurdish) is a Middle Eastern tradition of geometric mirrorwork that emerged from the desire to create beauty from the broken. This craft continues a 15th-century philosophical tradition that originated in the Middle East and viewed existence as at once singular, multiple, and unified. That all individuals in existence undergo motion and flux at each instant. This school of thought prioritizes becoming over static, immutable being.
Āina-kāri-Awena Karî (Kurdish) has traditionally been used in architecture to create geometric patterns that adorn the internal spaces of mosques, shrines, and residential spaces.
Recently, we have been paying more attention to flags and nations. Nations and landmarks! Locations of power as symbols. We are also thinking about the many stateless nations, their landmarks, and what those bear as symbols. Perhaps a deep and rich history of resistance combined with traces of generational trauma, colonization, and marginalization, but also love, sacrifice, and belonging.
Belonging to a geography, a river, a mountain. Being children of a habitat rather than its owners! Seeing civilization through coexistence.
The White House in Farsi is translated as The White Palace! Kakhe Sefeed. As if, in the language's subconscious and Iranian history, a house doesn’t embody the appropriate status—it has to be a palace. The authoritarian aspect of power mounts the location in the language's subconscious onto the symbol of such power: “A king.” That is how cross-cultural projection works, folding language, politics, and history onto the same plane.
