cookies

Curator:
Mana Tashakorinia
Upcoming (looking for a space to sit)

PROJECTS:

Artists:
Saedeh Doostbekheir
Meshkat Talebi
Kimia Asgarian
Mana Tashakorinia

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Photo:
Mana Tashakorinia

Part of the violence of disappearance lies in the way it renders its victims fundamentally inaccessible. These bodies and their sufferings can be seen but only in the mind’s eye, through acts of imagination, by reading the traces that violence carelessly, yet inevitably, leaves behind. ‘‘To see’’ in the context of disappearance might involve transcending the physical act of looking, seeing what is no longer, and perhaps was never, visible…*

Cookies is a curatorial project that explores the culture of fragmented visuals and how these fragments bear witness to the anxieties of hegemonic power. These "cookies" are the faint traces left behind when power, too distressed to retrace its steps, fails to collect them.

The projects included in this initiative were photographed during times of unrelenting violence—periods marked by suppressed protests, destroyed archives, and crushed planes. Both the artists and the viewers take on the role of forensic experts, tracing these scattered remnants in an attempt to reconstruct the unspoken narratives of these events.

This exhibtion is trying to communicate that the fragmentation of these remnants does not signal a lack of agency on the part of the subjects; rather, it reveals the unease and instability of power as it enacts violence. Each fragment becomes evidence—not of erasure, but of the cracks in the façade of authority. All the projects reference politically suppressed, violent incidents in the context of Iran, incidents deliberately excluded from official documentation. Cookies are the inevitable imprints of this archioviolence.

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* Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women, Duke University Press eBooks, 2003, 78, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384373.

خانه