Performance
2025
Presented at Shaar Gallery – Tehran
ShærKhāni is an installation–performance that exposes official, media, and state language not as a vehicle of meaning but as worn, repetitive material in a state of collapse. The gallery is covered with official newspapers; papers that once carried the language of authority are transformed into spatial matter—walls, floor, objects. The audience walks within a language that once structured reality and is now reduced to a hollow, tactile surface.
The space is dim. The performer moves with a camera mounted on the head, broadcasting a live image onto the wall. In near silence, words are arranged, repeated, and murmured—words drawn from censored news, empty slogans, and repetitive media speech. What once functioned as an instrument of power becomes meaningless, abrasive, or even absurd through repetition. Language is stripped of its commanding function and turns into exhausted sonic matter.
The live projection reverses the structure of seeing: the camera, typically a tool of surveillance, becomes a device of exposure. The viewer is not merely an observer; they are implicated within a field of word-fragments, objects made of dead language, and live images. ShærKhāni extends a line of practice that severs language from authority, proposing semantic disruption and linguistic disorder as forms of resistance.