SIMORGH 10
2018
SIMORGH AS A MATTER OF CONTEMPORANEITY
“… If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will find that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more, are but the shadows cast by that unveiling.
What shadow is ever separated from its maker?
Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same, so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries…”
Mantiq-ut-Tayr, Farid ud-Din Attar
As a creature, Simorgh is a mythological hybrid of a beast and a bird. The story of Simorgh is a central mythos, and a guiding narrative of Shahnameh, (“The Book of Kings”), a long epic poem written by Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010 AD.
Simorgh also emerges as a concept, and a construct of culture, in other Persian poets’ work such as Farid ud-Din Attar. In his celebrated literary masterpiece of Persian literature, Mantiq-ut-Tayr, also known as The Conference of the Birds, Simorgh is used as a metaphor for multitude, that is, the collective conscious of 30 birds in search for truth that creates a -30 bird, that is, a Simorgh. If the word is translated verbatim, it means 30 birds!
It is this metaphorical construct of culture that is examined in Simorgh collection of Aref Montazeri. He is looking into a contemporary reading of Simorgh as a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of subjectivity and political agency.In a pre-modern, pre-enlightenment, community, or the tribe, it is the stature of the king, the tribe leader, or the commune’s monarch within which the voice of the public is manifested and finds a place of presentation. His motto for this collection is “SIMORGH: mirror as a medium of collective social thinking”.
Modernity allows for the emergence of societal democracy. That is, the public voice becomes a matter of representation. Members of the society select their representatives who behold the right to “represent” the voice of the republic of members of the public! With network condition, comes a new form of political agency, non-representative democracy. The contemporary collective, the Simorgh, is not the pre-modern community or the modern society, it is the very manifestation of multitude, where each and every member of the collective owns a singular voice.
In such collectivity, “self-casting” becomes the de facto mode of global broadcasting. Everybody has enough airtime to voice their own thoughts and desires. Nobody is “represented,” but actually very much “present” in the global dynamics of subjectivity and politics. In such condition, conscious becomes a matter of collective contemplation and what can be characterized as social thinking; social campaigns transform to momentary heated debates of on-line social networks, through which elections are rigged, revolts are orchestrated and public spaces are actually or even virtually occupied. As such, what starts as innocent self-casting, results in full-fledged paradigm shifts…
Text by Nashid Nabian
SIMORGH 10, 2018 Mirror, Customized polymer and textured epoxy with chrome coating, silver glitter, plywood, stainless steel 330x252x284 cm
SIMORGH 10, 2018 Mirror, Customized polymer and textured epoxy with chrome coating, silver glitter, plywood, stainless steel 330x252x284 cm
SIMORGH 10, 2018 Mirror, Customized polymer and textured epoxy with chrome coating, silver glitter, plywood, stainless steel 330x252x284 cm
SIMORGH 10, 2018 Mirror, Customized polymer and textured epoxy with chrome coating, silver glitter, plywood, stainless steel 330x252x284 cm
SIMORGH 10, 2018 Mirror, Customized polymer and textured epoxy with chrome coating, silver glitter, plywood, stainless steel 330x252x284 cm