FROM A HEIGHT OF ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY CENTIMETERS

Performance
Produced in Tehran, 2020
In collaboration with my fellow artist Furuq Noei

Honorable mention piece of  the 11th National Ceramic Biennial of Iran, Tehran

Photography: Nima Mansouri


On the path of self-cultivation, it takes an act of solid courage for a seeker to dig and break the self in order to recognize and abandon the excesses and then still manage to reorganize himself to carry on.  This process is a rugged yet exciting journey in which these shatterings and rebuildings continue until there is no self to be torn apart, or any remaining to be put together. This would be the stage of liberation from egoism and indeed the beginning of freedom.

The presented series of images is a documentary of a performance piece in which a ceramic vessel is dropped from a height of one meter and twenty centimeters to be torn to pieces. Then, from the broken pieces, those of less than one square centimeter are tossed away as appendages and the rest of the components are re-glued together to rearrange the volume of the container as much as possible.  The repaired volume is again released from the same height and the process of disintegration and reassembly of the volume is repeated.  This process continues until, in the end, there is nothing left to drop, or in other words, nothing to reorganize.