Navid Salajegheh
Hand/.../Hand
17.1.–13.4.2025
Hands greet, build, and form the world. They turn words into actions and the mundane into poetry. Becoming gestures and motions, hands fill the gaps and set words into movement, revealing our innermost thoughts and desires. Tactile touch contributes to our consciousness, while a slight quiver exposes our unconscious selves. Instinctively, hands clench into fists. They speak the momentary language of immediacy but also form and break cultural norms. We tell stories with our hands, but hands can also silence and suppress.
In the collages of Iranian artist Navid Salajegheh, fingers reach towards one another, hands huddled together, but never quite touching. Despite the hands' unison, the images are filled with gaps and absence. Is it hesitation to touch, or are the hands restrained?
Salajegheh practices what he calls “shading” the world – an intervention in memories and knowledge. Shades are like ghosts, wandering souls that appear after the death of things, shining upon the world. However, they do not live in weightless and abstract eternity – shades are physical, heavy, and ironic (they are not the same as shadows). Shades cannot be seen with eyes but touched by hands. Shading is a practice of fragmenting and encoding memories, like an archaeology of the unseen.
Salajegheh works with both visual and textual materials. In a satirical story written by the artist, government officials are plagued by ancestors visiting them every night in their dreams. One ancestor sits in a man's room all night and talks endless nonsense, filling the room with non-stop chatter. With his back turned to the sleeper and his face hidden, he holds the sleeper's hands tightly in his grip. The fragmented and inconsistent babble of the ancestor drives the sleeper to the brink of madness, even though his only wish is to be heard. “Just listen… listen…”
The police are set to investigate the case when the highest-ranking officials begin losing their minds over the insufferable dreams. The inspectors start patrolling people's nightly visions, and the sleepers are armed with shields and rocks against the grandmothers and uncles who pour their trivial but intimate memories to them.
«Recently, something similar has happened to a lot of the government officials and for some, it has become unbearable. That’s why they have decided to conduct a thorough and official investigation before things get even worse. One person has dreamed of his grandmother describing to him the softness of a women's ankles and another's ancestor visits his dreams to tell him about the taste of peach. All their dreams are absurdly childish, but the fact that these childish dreams have brought down the highest-ranking officials of the country is the real ridiculous part. Sometimes, I laugh at the thought of all this being an extremely elaborate prank. Especially now that they have transferred the case from the official psychologists to the criminal police, it has become even more hilarious. Is it really the inspector's job to snoop around in people’s dreams to find out why a group of people have fallen into collective madness? I am pretty sure we don’t have the necessary training to jump into a victim’s dream to find out which one of their ancestors haunt their dreams. Are we expected to have a voodoo department in our station?»
The absurdity of Salajegheh's story is not completely alien to reality where the majority of the world's population lives under watching eyes. Observing each other soon becomes a habit, and our minds develop careful ways to track not only our public selves but our own innermost thoughts, as well. Oftentimes people might adjust their identities, reject memories, and develop conscious and unconscious coping mechanisms to survive.
But can humanity and its quirks ever really be muzzled? Like the ancestors appearing in dreams, humans have enormous resilience of expression, both conscious and unconscious. Traumas of war and violence travel generations and can today be detected even on the level of genes, haunting both individual and collective identities. Ancestors pop up in dreams and strange déjà vus itch our memories. Thoughts are exchanged through side eyes and signs, stories are told by gentle touch, and art emerges through bizarre rifts and cracks.
The invisible hands in Salajegheh's collages remind that absence does not equal nothingness and has therefore also presence. Like Shades, the gaps might be more alive and expressive than the thing itself.
Navid Salajegheh (b. 1981) is a visual artist and architect from Tehran, Iran. He works across various mediums, including collage, installation, performance, video, as well as fictive and theoretical texts. His work draws on found objects, memories, history, and geography. Through repetition and deconstruction, these elements transform into new forms. Salajegheh has maintained an active professional practice for over twenty years. In addition to numerous exhibitions in his home country, his works have been shown across Europe, including Ireland, Austria, and the Netherlands.
Courtesy of Aaran Art Gallery, Teheran, Iran
Curated by Malin Barth