Installation view at YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku, 2019
YARAT announces the group exhibition Fragile Frontiers: Visions on Iran’s in/visible borders, running from 22 November 2019 – 16 February 2020, presenting newly commissioned as well as recent works of 16 artists who view frontiers as precarious, ephemeral or frictional, arguing that no border – whether cultural, territorial or psychological – is completely durable. Examining the dilemma of borders within the Iranian context, alongside its neighbouring nations, the show raises questions about political identity as well as internal, interpersonal and international boundaries.
On the first floor, the show explores the invisible frontiers between body space and city space; chaos and order; social and personal space; ‘I’ and ‘other’. Kamrooz Aram’s new multi-media work Elegy of Blue Architecture (2019) contains multiple cultural references from Iran, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan - countries united by a Persian heritage - through various materials and forms. Aram explains, "If the object in question is hundreds of years old and the borders that delineate nations have shifted and evolved over centuries, then the claim of national origin assigned to an object is dubious (geographic and national origin, of course, are not necessarily the same)".