kunstverein W.A.S. and raum
Maryam Farhang
if I had a body …

Through the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), the presence of death became embedded in the artist’s body, making it both witness and archive.

Through this lens, the artist perceives parallels with children in Gaza. In her artist’s book, she overlays their bodies with her own in a distorted visual field. The book remains closed—a symbol of an unwritten history, like eyes that refuse to witness.

The installation unfolds as an unfinished landscape of large-scale textile works. Shifting spaces between darkness and light examine how the body adapts to an unfamiliar place—and how it resists erasure and ethnic cleansing.

In a performance based on the philosophy of Iranian miniature painting, light and body are intertwined, dissolving hierarchies. The movement of the body carries the light, stitching together future, time, and memory.

Through fabric, video, sound, and repeated poetry, violence is transformed into vocal resistance, where body and land merge in death.