Pause in Movement, 2012
Group exhibition: ‘Mapleton Bree Prize’, Kendrew Barn, St John’s College, United Kingdom, 2013
Group exhibition: ‘In Site’, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2012
Exhibition Catalogue: In site, ’ The Ashmolean Museum, edited by the Curating Team: Jess Draper, Hilary Floe, Sohin Hwang, Natalie Sanderson, Vid Simoniti and Farniyaz Zaker, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2012
Installation
Silk, cotton, tailors dummy, and mixed media
250cm x 250cm x 320cm
The nature of dwelling is not limited to a built environment, but that several environments can be regarded by their inhabitants as dwellings, due to the fact that place is commonly associated with security and stability as opposed to the openness, freedom, and threat of the space surrounding it. In this respect woman’s clothing becomes a microcosmic dwelling place. Through the convergence of multiple meanings of the word pardeh/ پرده, this work attempts to highlight the linkage between clothing, virginity, and architecture (enclosed spaces), by conceptualising the skirt as an extended home, as a walled space of infinite privacy. پرده means ‘curtain’ and also it refers to virginity in Persian. In many other Muslim countries, the word also means the veil (women’s clothing), although its roots are pre-Islamic. Both curtains and skirts separate spaces – both physical and metaphysical – between men and women, between the public and the private, and interestingly they also make this boundary of public and private unclear, by stressing the most inner part of the privacy of a woman: virginity