Pardeh, 2011
Solo Exhibition: 'Primeval Relationship,' The Ruskin, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2014
Solo exhibition: ‘Pardeh’, Old Masters Room, The Ruskin, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2011
Installation
Ink on silk
pardeh means ‘curtain’ in Persian. In many other Muslim countries, the word also means veil, although its roots are pre-Islamic. divar/دیوار means ‘wall’. Both curtains and walls separate spaces – both physical and metaphysical – between men and women, between the public and the private, whether through clothing or through architecture. This installation highlights the linkage between the veil and architecture, by conceptualising the pardeh/veil as an extended home, as a walled space of infinite privacy. Together with the word دیوار in this artwork the walled space fades away, emulating historical changes of Iranian domestic architecture and dress codes, and the way in which these changes have complicated the segregation of space into the spheres of the private/public and of the male/female.