What House Now?
Mirror, Aluminum and Wood, 2022, Collaboration with Nooshin Hakim. This is a second version of the White House series created first in 2017
The act of salvagement has always fascinated us. Āina-kāri is an Iranian tradition of geometric mirrorwork that was born out of the desire to create beauty from the broken. This craft is a continuation of a 15th-century philosophy that emerged in the Middle East which viewed existence as being at once singular, multiple, and unified. That all individuals in existence undergo motion and flux, at each instant. This school of thought privileges becoming over static, immutable beings. Āina-kāri traditionally has been used in architecture, creating geometric patterns that overtake the internal spaces of mosques, shrines, and residential spaces. Recently, we think of flags and nations with more attention! Nations and landmarks! Locations of power as symbols. We are also thinking of the many stateless nations and their landmarks and what those bear as symbols. Perhaps a deep and rich history of resistance combined with traces of generational trauma, colonization, and marginalization, but also love, sacrifice, and belonging. Belonging to a geography, a river, a mountain. Being children of a habitat rather than its owners! Seeing civilization through coexistence. The White House in Farsi has been translated into The White Palace! Kakhe Sefeed. As if in the subconscious of the language and Iranian history a house doesn’t embody the appropriate status —It has to be a palace. The authoritarian aspect of the power mounts the location in the subconsciousness of the language onto the symbol of such power “A king.” That is how cross-cultural projection takes place folding language-politics-history onto the same plain.
