Testify

Little gallery, Calgary, Canada, 2013

“Testify” is an installation composed of 12 hanging dresses and sound. Eleven dresses are made of pieces of canvas (the material used for painting) which were ornamented with Iranian cultural elements: Farsi text and Islamic patterns. The text was partially handwritten and the rest of it was screen printed, using black ink. In making these dresses I didn’t use traditional techniques of sewing, instead gluing pieces of canvas together and binding the seams with a stapler. The dress, which is installed in the middle, is all black, dyed with the same ink that is used for silkscreen on the other dresses. Each dress has a speaker playing a sound track. The soundtrack is my declamation of a poem about freedom, by Iranian famous poet “Ahmad Shamloo”.