▎ Exhibition Statement
وَالْحَمْدُ لِلّهِ قاِصمِ الجَّبارینَ مُبیرِ الظّالِمینَ
[All praise is due to God, the Crusher of tyrants and the Destroyer of oppressors.]
I know what my pain is, but I don’t know how or where to begin. Should I start from the end or from the beginning? Perhaps it’s better to take the thread from the middle. For instance, I could start in the mid-1980s, right when I was born amidst a multitude of casualties and a vast sea of mourners.
Unaware of what war truly was. Yet, there was war—a great war, a hard war, a bitter war that was never meant to, nor will it ever, leave its taste from my mouth or my psyche. It feels as if I am trapped in a pit; a pit that grows deeper and deeper each day, rising with me, such that even if I stand on my tiptoes and stretch tall, I will see nothing but thick, black smoke that refuses to pass or dissipate.
They say our eight-year war was the second largest war of the century after the Vietnam War. Could it have been avoided? Could it have been ended? What reason could there be for this much prolongation?
And my pain strikes here; like a shrapnel left in the body of a survivor. A place where many lives are snatched away.
True, war is war and is no laughing matter; but what happens when it itself becomes a great joke? Do you know that blood flows?
It flows and flows and flows like a flood, sweeping away all hope, aspiration, effort, and love—from young and old, from mother and father, from sister and brother, from child and even the neighbor’s kid; the one who wanted to be a champion in wrestling. The one who wanted to become a mother. The one who wanted to soon become a father. The one who wanted to be a teacher in mathematics. The one who wanted to be an employee in an office. The one who wanted to own a house. The one who wanted to be a traveler on a journey. The one who wanted to drown in a book. The one who wanted to be a representative for their mother. The one who wanted to become a bride at the wedding table. The one who wanted to find healing in illness. The one who wanted to grow up in their childhood games. And even the one who was nobody but wished to become somebody—everyone is swept away in the blink of an eye over the span of eight years. And all those unfinished dreams are replaced with new realities.
And we remain with a pit that cannot be filled and a wound that is always open.
Pause for a moment. Listen to me. I am speaking of a catastrophe.
Raziyeh Aarabi
▎ Appendix
The collection presented under the title “Hole” is an anti-war conceptual series that has been seriously engaged in research and data collection since 2018. After various considerations and several years of delay, it was finally unveiled to the public in 2024.
This collection includes 25 photographs of various sizes and a video art piece, displayed together as an installation.
It is important to note that all photographs in the panels are documentary in nature and belong to personal albums of individuals who lost their lives during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.
The reason for covering the faces of some individuals in the photographs with a red hole shape serves as a metaphor for death and the end of lives taken by war; similar to our immediate reaction when someone dies, covering their face right away.
The choice of the name ”Hole” for this collection refers to one of its common meanings in Persian (grave), which aptly conveys the ultimate purpose and intent of this project.