TEHRAN – An exhibition displaying a collection of works by Iranian artists at the Lodge, a Los Angeles art center, invites people to think about ways of arranging their personal space.

The showcase named “My Very Favourite Things” opened on April 22 and will run until May 22.

Reza Rostampisheh, Turaj Khamenehzadeh, Omid Majidinejad, Bahar Sabzevari, Kamran Sharif, Nazanin Parviz, Semco Salehi and Ardeshir Mohasses are among the artists whose works have been selected for the exhibit by curator Narges Hamzianpur.

Hamzianpur is an art market expert and consultant with a focus on the art of the West Asia.

In a statement for the exhibition, the organizers wrote, “For the last year, many of us have been quite stationary and confined to our homes.

“The home or the spaces we reside in are a substitute vessel for the soul. The architecture protects and nourishes us, the interior objects distinguish and identify us. We signal our interior selves in their furnishings.” 

The works by these 21 artists from multiple artistic disciplines invite the viewer to stay and perhaps explore in an unorthodox fashion.

The statement also added, “The COVID-19 pandemic has deprived us of the immediate means of access to the world, or at least forces us to envisage it in new ways.

“The glamour of travel across the globe, the cosmopolitan sociability and consumption, in their many forms, of the world’s great metropolises have given way to an urgent need to rethink intimate space, both in terms of its physical character, and the human relations it comprises. 

“Cultural and social diversity is becoming a rare resource, leading us to question its place in our lives: on the one hand, its great richness, and on the other, the new borders it imposes on us.

“Under lockdown, a new temporality is emerging, in which objects around us sometimes play a primordial role, forming at times a harmonious symphony, at others a deafening racket that blows the whistle on solitude.

“Drawing together in one place works and pathways from diverse worlds, the exhibition ‘My Very Favourite Things’ invites us to think about ways of arranging our personal space, by ‘locking diversity down’ within a domestic setting, cut off from the wide world’s vast spaces, it questions our notions of cosmopolitanism, with the moral obligation it carries of trying to understand the ‘other’, but also the tendency it implies to ‘collect’ things and relationships.”

Photo: A silkscreen on paper by Semco Salehi is among the artworks on display in “My Very Favourite Things” at the Lodge, Los Angeles.

MMS/YAW