Inja Daghighan Nime Shab Ast (This Is Exactly Midnight)

This project was performed based on a simple conscience and lasted for a year. The day I was preparing a glass of hot milk for a friend who had a cold. After drinking the milk, the traces of the milk on the empty glass were like the marks my friend left on the glass.

     This spark made me think about how I could synchronize my personal work with my mind at the same time. The mind that became more and more confused every night by reading the news from the official website of BBC Persian from what was happening to me and us in Iran, and it got worse every day.

     So every night at 9 o’clock I drank a glass of hot milk while reading the news, and recorded the news at the same time. The effect of reading the news while drinking the milk and the trace that is left from that moment on me. I think as if the news was an internal effect that externally appeared on the glass. This project lasted from January 27^th 2014 to January 27^th 2015.

     I chose the BBC because the history of its role and influence on Iranian politics was undeniable, and I chose January (Bahman) because it was a crucial month in changing the Iran’s government to another one. Then I separated the twelve months of the year into the shelves and arranged them in the gallery.

     I asked the audiences to hand over their cellphones before entering the gallery and to put the nylon bags on to cover their hands and feet, and then to enter the gallery space silently. I decided not to attend the exhibition so the audience can face my work directly. The reason for covering the hands and the feet was an irony to the black atmosphere created by the news so the “pollution” would not be transmitted in the space. An all-black space without a tiny glimmer of light or hope.

     The name of the exhibition (Inja Daghighan Nime Shab Ast (This Is Exactly Midnight)) is based on a code that was chosen after the 1953 Iranian coup d’état to inform Shah of the overthrow of the Mossadegh’s government. I chose this code again to inform the audience of their own overthrow over these years.

Razieh Aarabi