Bringing together works of fifty-two contemporary Iranian artists from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection, the exhibition borrows its title from a poem by Rumi, which was inspired by an ancient story of The Elephant and the Blind. The poet cleverly changes the dramatic state of blindness into darkness which has a cure, while the poem illustrates how complex it is to evaluate an event, situation or an object by seeing it from a particular angle and not as a whole. It underlines the incapability of human beings to understand various realities (physical and metaphysical), without using all senses and various means of understanding.
Taking Rumi’s poetic tale as a point of departure, the exhibition attempts to display both formal and conceptual practices that Iranian artists have adopted over the past decade, both inside and outside the country, to express their concerns. The vast selection of works in the collection provides a unique opportunity to present a comprehensive narrative of the social and artistic developments that are taking shape among the artists.