Inverted Boundaries: Rethinking the Body and Identity

Hamidreza Karami

Mohammadreza Khalaji's sculptures, with their poetic yet unsettling engagement with the human body, invite the viewer to a fresh encounter with the concepts of identity, stability, and transformation. At times, a body appears inverted, with its feet pointing toward the sky and its torso submerged in a flat surface, as if paused between collapse and an unknown ascension. This inversion challenges not only the law of gravity but also the conventional logic of perceiving the human form, compelling the audience to relearn the act of seeing. Elsewhere, a figure stands with an unstable body - between animal and human, between clothing and skin - seemingly undergoing metamorphosis or rebirth. The sharp edges and incomplete formation of the face and torso speak of a fragmentation of identity - of a being that belongs neither to the past nor fully to the future. The cutting forms and rough-carved surfaces remind us that the body is also a site for inscribing history and suffering. These works are not merely representations of the body but rather a visual expression of humanity’s suspension in an unsettled world - a world where bodily certainty has yielded to doubt, transition, and transformation. The combination of timelessness and placelessness in the execution is accompanied by an existentialist approach, posing a fundamental question: when form is emptied of meaning, how does it reconstruct itself?