The artworks presented in Sanaz Safanasab’s solo exhibition, one can claim, leap beyond the mere “realm of sensuous” and confinements of feeling and what is the conventional sphere of “the beautiful”. These pieces thus clearly scape the limitations of classical aesthetics and what conventionally they ought to evoke or produce in the user.

Sanaz’s pieces, whether in the medium of drawing, painting, or weaving, showcase an inquiry for the manifestation of a living network that carries and, at the same time, creates meaning. This “warp” permeates the inorganic solid lines of the architecture, saying that “its material is the matter” itself. Although Sanaz is creating with the lexicon and upon the foundations of architecture, her pieces consciously avoid the abstract understanding of architecture by scaping the rules of geometry and symmetry.

In this negation, the warps of meaning, leaving their points of departure, intersperse the space by scaping, destabilizing, and consequently, making an alternative perception possible. This becomes feasible solely by standing in between the dichotomies of solid/fluid, and organic/inorganic, reinventing a shape of bodily spatial experience, and creating a space that can be temporal, transformative, dialogic, and changeable.

In this space, the artist provides a platform for self-conscience in which one can activate the processes of re-orientation and awareness of the self and the “other” concerning the surroundings. This experience of self-conscience rather than being indifferent, relative, and comparative to the surroundings, provides an interdependent understanding of them. Hence, by pointing to the persisting warps of meaning-making and carrying- instead of being overwhelmed and dominated by one end of the spatial dichotomy, “the spirit” can reach reciprocal recognition in an in-between space.

Essay by Alireza Bayat