Bāygān: House of Photographs and Words

Behnam Sadighi

Untitled from the series We are all fine

2005

Text

Sara Yektapour

Transition

This photograph, with its empty space, is a perfect mirror of being a student—from its abstract eternity to its uncertain forever in this geography. Like a primitive human who sees the tribal cave paintings left by those before him; everything in the picture is both tangible and yet mental to me. The walls, like a film exposed to light, are a record of things that were created, destroyed, and changed. Of what came and went. Of what passed. It is a remnant of movement and change, appearing as a stain, a glue mark—sometimes born of violence, carelessness, or haste—or peeling paint on the wall. Something that everyone who came stuck on the wall, then took with them just before leaving, or after leaving, the next person wiped it off to replace it with something else. And with a little trace of the past suspended until the next comes to reshape it according to their own taste.

What is on the right wall is like beliefs that are formed and once thought to be the most complete conception of the world. That fragment which, with the passage of time, has fragmented and formed a new but fragile shape. Intense emotions can be seen in the unclear mass of lines and grotesque caricatures of both supporters and opponents, along with colloquial phrases—at one moment the most genuine human feeling, and the next moment so embarrassing it must be obscured and hidden.

This photograph is an image of temporary life in a small rectangle, with a head full of a thousand worries and intoxicated by the opium of reform. It relates to a period of life spent temporarily, but believing in its temporariness is the bitterness of the last time when you pack your life—a suitcase of clothes, some books, and your bedding—and migrate forever from there to an unknown place, an unknown time, or an unknown geography. At best, a worn layer of what once made the hard surface beneath you somewhat bearable remains and gathers dust until one day it is recorded—before the next person arrives.