Scented Rooms

Shauheen Daneshfar

The exposition Scented Rooms aims to be a form of resistance that finds itself in poetry and politics, poetic imagery, re-thinking censored archives, existential reflections on photography and cinema, and dance. At the very core of the research is an important historic icon in Iran; The country's oldest theater which was burnt down by extremists during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, closed forever and has decayed over time. The burning of this theater, along with many others, was the starting point for imposing restrictions on art and culture. The research departs contextually from the efforts of the Islamic government to control civil society. It is a reaction to a history of imposing a specific language discourse and discarding elements that represent a non-religious view, visual changes in the urban space and limiting access to specific types of information that refer to citizens’ collective memory. Giving agency to this theater, the research aims to revive the collective and public memory of a society, being the voice of those that have been silenced for a long time.

I went to the pottery workshop last night
I saw thousands of jars that were eloquent and silent
Each of them were talking to me in the present tense:
Where is the potter, the buyer or the seller? (Omar Khayyam [11th-12th Century])

How could I summon the mass of absence, of memories, from the heart of the theater? While I was facing a place empty of people, where the worn objects were the only survivors of an entire era?
Just as Omar Khayyam speaks of the language of the jars in the workplace and hears them.
How to depict this delicate, existential aspect of existence?

Next

Tip

Tip