Blanc Gallery is thrilled to present Maryam Taghavi’s solo exhibition, A Leap Has No Return, curated by Blanc Gallery Director, Rohan Ayinde.
Inspired by a pair of sigils offering the possibility to disappear and reappear, the show ruminates on the power of female agency to imagine the imperceptible. Taghavi extracted these two sigils from the Islamic occult practice of Sīmiyā, which is the arrangement of letterforms and numbers to invoke invisible powers. A form of spellcraft, sigils promise to harness these powers for the fulfilment of wishes.
By reincarnating these occult symbols in the context of the gallery, Taghavi challenges the traditional hierarchies of the belief system they arise from by placing her body and gaze at the center of their recontextualization. It is from this vantage point that she has crafted 4 large-scale horizons: a series of diamond shaped dots registering as multi-colored lines that loosely divide the surface of her paintings into halves. These lines signal the distance at which disparate realities can converge. They conjure a bridge between the possible and the impossible.
This exhibition is as much about what is in front of you as it is about what is anticipated. Taghavi combines light, color, shape, space and symbol to blur the line between one place and another. The colors found in the paintings reappear outside in the form of an installation providing a temporary roof for the gallery’s adjacent courtyard. They anticipate a gathering, the potential for a collective appearance.
A Leap Has No Return evokes ژینا, the name of a woman whose death sparked the reappearance of millions of bodies in grief, rage and revenge. Zhina Amini, who was murdered by the morality police, is synonymous with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Her name has taken on a power that seeks to upend the dominating structures that led to her death. On her temporary gravestone, these poignant words were carved: