Boroufar’s embrace of weaving—atavistic as it may appear—alongside her representation of architectural forms and traditions on the verge of extinction, offers a poetical portrait of our broken present, a protest against forgetting, and a paean to another way of moving through the world.
Boroufar’s weaves are uncanny. They remind us of elements of the built environment via a correspondence that is subtle, ambiguous, pleasing. Gaze at two tall and skinny structures she has woven long enough and you may see a pair of wind towers, known as bad-gir, a form of vernacular architecture for cooling structures in the desert. Elsewhere, a clump of hexagons—also woven—begins to evoke the delicate tile work one might find in the great mosques of Esfahan. Another work takes inspiration from gaalipoush, the ancient practice of covering roofs with leaves in the northern Caspian Sea region—an architectural gesture but also a psychic one: nature in the service of healing, protecting.