Once at Present: Contemporary Art of the Bay Area Iranian Diaspora (2019)
Shirin Khalatbari
Naught (detail), 2019
Slip cast ceramics
For her Naught series, Khalatbari utilizes material to allude to Sumerian, Greek, Inca, and other creation myths in which humans were created out of clay. She covers found clothing garments with dozens of layers of porcelain slip, and then completely burns them out in the kiln, leaving a fragile trace of the interior existence of what existed before. She takes as inspiration the words of 12th Century Persian mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam:
O foolish one, this molded earth is naught
This particolored vault of heaven is naught
Our sojourn in this seat of life and death
Is but one breath, and what is that but naught.
Once at Present: Contemporary Art of the Bay Area Iranian Diaspora
March 29 - April 20, 2019
Minnesota Street Project
San Francisco, CA
Photo credit: Scott Chernis