The collection "If There’s No Light ..." is her sixth solo exhibition and her second collaboration with INJA gallery. This series includes 25 paintings with color pencil material on cardboard in different dimensions.

She is a painter of familiar subjects that are often ordinary and forgotten and she tries to explore their inner essence. The predominant technique of her works is pencil, which, like her subjects, is a tangible and familiar tool.

Her main concern is the passage of time, which she deals with in parallel with her other minds.
 

“If There Is No Light, ...”

Chandeliers, those illuminative and decorative creations usually hung from ceilings, shine above our heads and provide us with light, playing the role of a miniature sun.

Due to their ability to diffuse light that passes through their multi-faceted ornaments, crystal chandeliers have stronger brilliance and reflection, amplifying light to give it greater allure.

In my childhood, I would join my father at ‘Saraye Delgosha’, which was then called the ‘Chandelier Makers Complex’. There, I became familiar with the components of this object of illumination and the process of its creation. Every time, I would bring home a handful of crystal ornaments and other accessories and begin making earrings and hairpins with them.

By creating chandeliers, my father would bless light with beauty and allure, spreading it with every fixture he delivered; it was this same light that provided our home with luminescence.

‘Saraye Delgosha’, a Qajar-era caravanserai located in Tehran’s Ark Square, was registered as a National Heritage Site in 1978; however, after years of disputes and despite the opposition of my father and other shop owners there, it was ultimately torn down in 2010 and turned into another shopping arcade, under the same name.

And this was how I bore witness to simultaneous incidents of destruction: the demolition of a historical site, the disintegration of a network of individuals creating light, and as a result, the extinguishment of our home’s source of illumination, my father.

Mahboobeh Noroozi

Autumn 2021