Norval Foundation is honoured to present Uncover: Kamyar Bineshtarigh, which opened on 23 July 2022 and runs to 10 October 2022. The exhibition is an opportunity for a selected young artist to explore working on a larger scale and in a museum context. For Uncover, Kamyar Bineshtarigh will expand on a body of work that considers materiality and texture as well as work that changes based on its temporal and climatic environment. Previous work will be reinterpreted for this exhibition, while one large-scale new work will be created as a site-specific response to the Norval Foundation’s location and the relationship with its surrounding landscape and social context. The works will be created through a process of layering canvas, ink, and cold glue, creating palimpsest-like surfaces.

This body of work starts with the studio wall. Specifically, Bineshtarigh’s studio wall in Salt River, in a previously abandoned clothing factory. Two years of working accumulated in a mass of marks and textures, seeped onto the studio wall as an unintended tracing of creating other pieces on the walls. The studio wall is a site for experimentation and record, as people who visit the studio leave their mark on it. The works become an accumulation of time passing through the visual layers seen on its surface.

Central to Bineshtarigh’s artistic practice is language and text, wrien and physical, through intuitive translations and transliterations of shape and form. This results in work that has a wrien component as much as it has an aesthetic one, with interpretation as an open- ended and involved activity for the viewer, both through imaginative aesthetic interpretation and through the puzzling of text fragments. His intention is embedded in emotive responses, rather than cognitive ones. Through transcription and integrative mark-making, Bineshtarigh’s practice involves a questioning of communication and linguistic identity – occupying a liminal space that explores rather than explains and enables a mode of working that is both beyond geographical borders but also intrinsically linked to place making and identification.

Uncover is a body of work that pivots around memory, layering and place. Thinking through the questions of location, while working in the former clothing factory in Salt River, Bineshtarigh’s work arises out of reflection and intuitive mark-making, while engaging with notions of history and presence