VideoInstallation (With Naghmeh Shadipour & Meysam Maghsoudi)
2025
Presented at Dena Art Gallery – Tehran
Dermatographia is a video installation in which the image appears not on a screen but on bodies. The viewer sits on a bench facing a mirror, beside deformed, faceless figures. Light and moving images are projected onto both the viewer and the figures. What the mirror reveals is a layered reflection: the viewer’s own body, the silent bodies beside them, and images that slowly settle on the skin and fade away.The images are neither narrative nor symbolic. They oscillate between skin texture, fading words, old wounds, and forgotten memories. The viewer is not merely an observer; they are the surface upon which the image lands. Their body becomes canvas, stage, and living memory that makes the act of seeing possible.The work is not about “seeing oneself,” but about perceiving oneself in relation to other presences — bodies that may have been beside us, or still are, yet remain faceless and silent. The video does not tell a story; it creates a field where something unseen can appear, perceptible only through the contact of light, skin, and reflection.From a phenomenological perspective, Dermatographia reconfigures self-reflection not as representation but as an interplay of light, body, and absence. The viewer’s body is simultaneously canvas, performer, and witness. What appears in the mirror is not simply a body, but the state of a body — a condition of being, standing, and being exposed.Without offering explicit statements, the work generates a sensory and unstable experience that awakens questions of memory, presence, absence, and our relation to other bodies.