Ab-Anbar presents “At 11:57 am Wednesday 23 October 2013”, the second solo exhibition of Iranian artist Reza Aramesh at the gallery, showcasing a new body of work, exploring the role that images of violence play in the contemporary moment, articulated from the vantage point of a single event: On this date, October 23, 2013, it was reported by media that in the southern province of Helmand, Afghanistan, a young couple that had eloped together was lured to the woman’s family home, and were later found decapitated, in what authorities believed was a honor killing. The horizon of this event, though marginal in the history of contemporary conflict, is a very telling personal story that addresses the central position of the body in the receiving end of violence: The reduction of the body politic to a community of mere bodies evaporates the distinction between our presence as subjects and simple biological existence. 
In the second part of the exhibition, Reza Aramesh presents a series of pottery vases, crafted by hand and fired in a traditional kiln in Iran, in the manner of the Greek narrative urns. They enable us to navigate the cross-references between classical art and the violence of the contemporary moment as a strategy to dislocate political history from the grand Western narrative and emplace it in larger framework of knowledge about the real.