Fresh-Cut Flowers

“Fresh-Cut Flowers”
In the face of catastrophe, it is not only the image that disappears; the very possibility and conditions of its representation are disrupted. What remains is a trace of the event: a sign severed from its context, suspended
at the threshold between representation and abstraction. Fresh-Cut Flowers begins with this suspension, with images caught between what once was and what can no longer be recovered.
The images in this series are deferred through cropping, omission, and displacement. They are detached from their original contexts to reveal the distance between us and catastrophe. While fractured from the event, these remnants continue to carry its memory, along with the possibility of transformation.
Developed over the past three years, the project was scheduled to be exhibited before the two most recent wars, but the exhibition, like the images themselves, was interrupted. In the meantime, the external reality shifted, and this interruption became part of the exhibition itself. The rupture now extends into the exhibition space: the images move away from the fixed position of the wall and are placed on the floor, along the lower edges of the walls and in the corners. The horizontal axis replaces the vertical and seemingly secure order of display, as if the image, like the reality from which it has been severed, no longer has a fixed place to stand
and the walls can no longer offer it a reliable ground.
Fresh-Cut Flowers seeks what remains within the image and what it anticipates of what is yet to come.
-Pegah Bahador and Amir Esfandiari