“VALID” Exhibition Featuring Works by Amirhossein Shahnazi at Aaran Gallery

Transmutation of Text: From “Reading” to “Seeing”

In the works of Amirhossein Shahnazi, the most significant artistic event lies in the suspension of the act of “reading” and its replacement with a pure experience of “seeing.” At first encounter with these sculptures, the viewer is confronted with a paradoxical condition: one recognizes that the raw material of these works is “text,” yet the possibility of reading it has been withdrawn. It is precisely at this point that transmutation occurs: words are displaced from their status as linguistic signs that merely carry meaning and message, and are instead transformed into “matter” and “object.”

Through the accumulation and compression of layered, cut textual fragments, the artist removes the dimension of time and narrative—an essential property of text—and instead grants words the dimensions of space and volume. When sentences from historical texts (such as the treatise “One Word” or writings by Akhundzadeh) are no longer extended across the surface of the page but are instead stacked upon one another, the linear logic of writing dissolves. There is no longer a beginning or an end to the sentences; what remains is a dense, entangled totality, an accumulation of demands that, over more than a century, resembles geological sediment or historical fossils rather than a readable book.

This approach compels the viewer to abandon the search for meaning between the lines and instead confront the “physics of words.” The serrations, sharp edges, indentations, and protrusions of Persian script here become a rough, tactile texture that actively engages light and shadow. This transformation carries a deeply symbolic message: ideas and valid constitutional laws, once abstract, fluid, and idealistic, have over time sedimented, accumulated, and now appear as rigid, heavy, and impenetrable structures.

The uniform matte black surface of the works further emphasizes this shift from “reading” to “seeing.” Blackness absorbs all textual detail, leaving only the overall form and monumental presence of the work. Here, we are no longer dealing with the content of those texts, but with the weight and gravity of their presence in contemporary life. In this sense, Shahnazi transforms literature into architecture, revealing how words—when accumulated—can construct solid walls or stable columns that can no longer be read, but only observed and physically felt.

At the far end of the gallery space stand three towering sculptures that at first evoke ancient totems. However, upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves as columns composed of textual fragments such as “derived from the nation,” “all individuals of the people,” and “the entirety of the population.” By selecting these key juridical and political phrases, the artist seeks to give corporeal form to the abstract concept of “the people.” These figures, seemingly born from language itself, take on a ritualistic and reverential quality.

Finally, within a white framed piece on the wall, we encounter the most striking moment of the exhibition: a statement whose ink has disappeared, yet whose pressure remains. This embossed white work is a powerful metaphor for the condition of law and promise. The words are not written on the paper; they are imprinted and pressed into it. Ink—symbol of materialization, clarity, and realization—is absent, yet the trace of mechanical pressure and typographic force remains with striking intensity.

This “invisible yet embossed text” speaks of laws that never materialized in reality and never reached the stage of implementation, yet whose pressure, absence, and unfulfilled presence continue to persist upon the collective memory.

Text by Leila Tayebi-Fard

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