Pardeh (literal translation: curtain) is a premise about material and immaterial spaces, a participatory artwork that allows us to express our interest in the realms of contradiction, interloping, and immateriality. It is an exercise in language, an elegantly simple poetic device for designating what is there but not there, real but intangible. It’s about rethinking the spaces and remaking meaning through language rather than producing handcrafted visual objects merely for retinal pleasure. By putting the everyday experience of opening a curtain in a different context we built a new narrative and interaction with the object.
Pardeh is a medium rather than an end in itself, an idea communicated by art rather than its formal aspects. It was conceived to construct a dialogue between the space and its viewer. In a sense, the audience becomes the actor upon the stage as the work does not exist without the viewer there actually taking part. This interaction constructs a theatre of poetic imagination, seamlessly weaving together poetry and movement.
Curtains both conceal and reveal. They do not only mark a threshold; they constitute one. Here, the curtain is a metaphor for the pineal gland where material body and immaterial mind causally interact. Behind the curtain is the immaterial space (private) and the front is material space (public). Through radical and direct handling of the object (opening the curtain) and language (reading the poem) the immaterial reveals itself.
Pardeh is about the process of dematerialization to shift the interest from object (the curtain) to immateriality (the space behind). The term dematerialisation highlights the process of distancing from an object, but that distancing is simply conceptual. This does not imply that materiality disappears altogether. It simply means that the curtain is obsoleted by the process of perception.
