Thing In Itself

Silk Screen Prints & Silk Screen Meshes | 2010

Aun Galley

“They insist on being believed in, and that doubt is sin. Too well, also, do I know what they themselves most believe in. Verily, not in backworlds and redeeming blood-drops: but in the body do they also believe most; and their own body is for them the thing-in-itself.”

Nietzsche ’s Zarathustra

“In the project I focused on the centrality of body in the cultural struggle, and the articulation of body as mutating systems functioning within a set of larger cultural and biological systems. Most of chapters of “The Book of Arda Viraf “* are about punishments men and specially women bodies suffer in the nether world, because of their bodily sins. Pahlavi texts is unreadable for lots of contemporary Iranians and it is an ancient book but I can find many similar thoughts like chapters of that in Iranian modern life, as well as resonances of similar thoughts reproduced in other societies everyday life. I used different sections of a person’s head MRI, as part of body that all texts and morals comes up from there, and covered it with Pahlavi texts. MRI is primarily a medical imaging technique most commonly used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structure and limited function of the body. Reproducing these shapes as a layer, I chose silkscreen mesh and print. A screen is made of a piece of porous, finely woven fabric called mesh stretched over a frame of aluminum or wood. Originally human hair then silk was woven into screen mesh; currently most mesh is made of man-made materials such as steel, nylon, and polyester. Areas of the screen are blocked off with a non-permeable material to form a stencil, which is a negative of the image to be printed; that is, the open spaces are where the ink will appear. Screen printing first appeared in a recognizable form in China , Japan and other Asian and eastern countries adopted this method of printing to reproduce forms and shapes. It is currently popular both in pop art and in commercial printing. I also hung a colored single silkscreen mesh reverse at the end of gallery titled body. it’s a Pahlavi world “Tan” which means body, that’s obsolescent among lots of morals and you can’t find any copy and printing of that.”

Parham Taghioff, 2010

* “The Book of Arda Viraf: Of a few extant but mostly anonymous Pahlavi writings, Book of Arda Viraf, better known as the Iranian Divina Commedia, is the most famous. Its original date of composing is obscure, but inaccurate claims have been made that it was composed in late 2nd century AD. The book describes Viraf’s descent into the netherworld, visiting heaven and hell and the pleasures and tortures awaiting the virtuous and the wicked. In its surviving form it is a prose work, written in simple, direct style; and an introductory chapter indicates a date after the Arab conquest. This late redaction was made in Fars. Here again we are confronted with a series of chaotic claims concerning the originality of the text. Some scholars believe it to be even of Hindu origin, and others given the fact that the whole of the Pahlavi literature was written tardily, roughly speaking after the Muslim conquest, regard it as a significant example of the transmission of a text for the Pahlavi literature. The book underwent many revisions, and in the final drafting, the introduction was written subsequently to the Muslim conquest. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica the book assumed its definitive form in the 9th-10th centuries AD.”

Alireza Seid Ahmadian, 2010