February 28th
Mona Tahani
5.6.–30.8.2026
February 28th is a printmaking project that refers to the day the United States and Israel began military attacks in Iran. As images of war, uncertainty, and displacement circulated across screens and borders, Mona Tahani (b. 1982 – Tehran, Iran) entered an extended and intensive month of production. At the same time, Tahani’s studio underwent its own transformation, becoming a site of continuous repetition through inking, pressing, layering, and erasing performed in an ongoing rhythm as works accumulated one after another. Within this process, printmaking became an endurance practice in which the physical demands of repetition mirrored a psychological state of suspension — of waiting, receiving fragmented information, and responding to events unfolding beyond reach and control.
Working from Norway while remaining emotionally connected to family and friends living in Iran, Tahani’s practice is shaped by a diasporic condition of simultaneity: physical distance combined with emotional proximity. In this tension, the repetitive nature of printmaking becomes a method of staying connected, where physical labor substitutes for distance and sustained making becomes a way of holding presence in the absence of direct contact. Around 400 prints and 15 handmade artist books emerged from this process, where physical labor became inseparable from anxiety, waiting, and the urgent need to remain connected while witnessing events unfold from afar yet feeling them intimately close to home.
The works do not unfold as singular images, but through accumulation and variation. Repeated gestures create a visual field shaped by duration, pressure, and exhaustion, where each impression carries the trace of an action rather than a resolved composition. Repetition becomes both structure and condition: a way of continuing to work while carrying emotional intensity without clear release.
The works carry traces of the human consequences of violence, with figures appearing fragmented, unstable, or partially dissolved. February 28th shift between intimacy and distance, never fully settling into a single mode of reading. At times the imagery suggests immediacy and closeness; at others, it reflects the difficulty of witnessing from afar, where experience arrives fragmented, mediated, and incomplete. The artist books extend this logic, functioning as condensed sequences in which repetition, interruption, and accumulation create shifting rhythms of attention.
Rather than functioning as retrospective reflection, the exhibition February 28th operates in real time, shaped by immediacy and ongoing uncertainty. The works do not seek to stabilize or narrate events, but instead remain within their unfolding. In this sense, the project becomes both a record of intensified artistic production and a sustained attempt to transform urgency into material form — where repetition, labor, and endurance replace closure.
Curated by Malin Barth