In his final days, my brother, Ahmad, was constantly reading the words written on the walls of the hospital without putting them in structured sentences. Facing the words and overwhelmingly devastating storm of associations and repetitions, he expressed different affective reactions such as smiles, ridicule, anger, and the like.

It is evident that every word is a form-image. Stating or hearing a word, alone or in arrangement with other words, looks like a musical tune. Music as such is also a form-image as photos are forms of things/objects. Words, hence, are sounds plus forms. They may covey meanings or may not. Words grow out of meaningless void, live in forms, and die finally meaningless. Words are born from meaningless, from empty sound, and absolute abstraction. They, then, find the chance to make sense while are constantly living on the edges of meaningless. Words, either meaningful or meaningless, either empty or tired of constant interpretations, always remain in the captivity of forms if they would be remembered, heard, inscribed, or read. We pronounce words and then an infinite multitude of images fall upon our minds.

This solo exhibition is reminiscent of the last days of Ahmad whose twenty-nine years and six months work-life were fully dedicated to carrying bureaucratic papers. He, in effect, was moving words from one place to another. When I was a kid, he constantly put words together to convince me that the globe was lying on the back of a gigantic whale or located on the horn of a fat huge cow. “If those animals shook”, said Ahmad, “the world would momentarily be destroyed.” As I grew up, he became more aware of the order of things in the world; thus, laughingly dismissed his old sayings. As hard as it could take, he tried obsessively to correct those, word by word, in my mind. As if he was Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, a Russian bureaucrat who spent his whole life copying letters.

In May 2020, Ahmad died in Tehran with his words laid in a poorer and more desperate world than of the Cloak’s St. Petersburg. Images in this exhibition are a tribute to “those words” that once stuck in his mind.

I am thankful to Somayeh, Iliad, Mohammad Rezaie-Kalantari, Mohammad Sarvi-Zargar, Mazdak Ayari, and Hossin Karimi for making this exhibition happen