In the present exhibition, Banafsheh Hemmati has brought an architectural device, i.e. Girih Tiles, into the domain of visual arts. It is basically a technique dedicated to the two-dimensional surface which she extends into the third dimension. In doing so, and by eliminating the “unique true form” she makes her way to the essence of the artistic act. In her artistic practice, the ideal of the unity is fading and the multiplicity of the forms recounts the absence of the ultimate form. Here the ‘traces’, in the sense Jacques Derrida maintained, have replaced the ultimate form. Her choice of Girih Tiles is an instance taken from Persian art, with no claim of retrieving the traditions or reviving a heritage. She simply takes a “device for multiplication”, and displays its potential to make varieties in the third dimension; and, in doing so, and by enabling the viewers to make up these varieties, she has made way to the infinite readings of the possible.

Banafshseh Hemmati is the artist of today, the time of faded archetypes, variety, multiplication, and the validity of seeing in diverse ways. Seeing numerous traces of an absent form, from the ‘original’ work which is invisible, and non-existent.  In Nietzsche’s words: “What can be seen in thousand different forms, is not one thing, but a thousand things.”

Babak Ahmadi