IN THE SKIN OF A DOG
curated by: Mia Milgrom, Natálie Kubíková
artist: Hamid Shams
19.9. - 16.11. 2024
The visually engaging work of Hamid Shams is full of religious as well as irreverent references layered with subtle whispers of the freedom movement and political liberation. Taking inspiration from graffiti slogans, IN THE SKIN OF A DOG introduces a large series of paintings that mimic and cross between partially covered up street tags and traditional prayer rugs. The paintings lock within them the contemporary situation in Iran, while simultaneously functioning as sacred objects. By using concrete and industrial paints on canvases, Shams is uncovering censored messages, rewriting them and finally obscuring them once again. The cyclicality of the gesture mirrors a rhythmic interplay between brutality and peace. All the careful details - golden drops of paint resembling spilled jewelry or the cracks in the surface - serve as allusions to a language of time. Through installations and performances, Hamid Shams poetically develops topics of mourning and violent systems of control and censorship. The magnetic sceneries point to mechanisms of ideological subjugation and brutality, as well as a deeply personal moment of losing oneself.
At the heart of the exhibition is an allegorical video installation, which reenacts and combines an emotional history, personal lived situations and dream-like flashes of symbolic moments. The video evokes a gloomy urban atmosphere of dark nights, leading the characters from a moment of loss to an inevitable violent act. Human bodies momentarily become animalistic, transforming into a pack of dogs entranced by a song of a woman in a long wedding dress. Drawing from the emptiness of loss, the performers enact a mourning ritual, traditionally observed during the month of Muharram to signify grief and sorrow. Mud becomes a binding element, the weight of an oppressive ideology and enslavement. The human condition is portrayed as a collective transformation - the rosewater, dripping from a shower pipe, symbolizes purity and renewal, connecting the past with the present while washing away the suffering. The aim is not to avoid suffering but to understand it - how to make physical pain, worldly defeat, or personal loss bearable. The video installation invites visitors to explore the body and its limits, its liberation, a moment of union. Through the strange duration of an excited exhaustion, the chants continue through the night. The world as experienced and the world as imagined fuse into one. Language can manifest as smell, it might also be a vibration or a melody of an instrument. In the video, we witness a struggle to define freedom and violence, seeking answers to the ambiguous question of who is the victim and what is being sacrificed.