Pegah Pasalar
Going South جانب جنوب 2025
From the ongoing project Exodus Pathology
Photography, cement bricks, table top fan,
Frames 22.28
installation with variable dimensions
South is a space South is a place
South is an organ South is a bless
South is a fish South is a dream
South is a compass South is a relief
South is a toward
South is my maman
The South remains, a prosperous ruin
In non-fiction cinema, hours of directionless and wishful framings are stored on memory cards and then structured into three-act narratives by moving “post-its” around. This process is called a paper cut.
Between memory and document, and the documentation of a document, the lower frequencies of ancestral inheritance move the bodies that are buried and float in ceaseless currents to remind us that structural coherence is only a fantasy.
Pegah Pasalar
every collapse carries many other collapses افتادنی که مرا می افتد 2023
From the ongoing project Exodus Pathology
Hand-blown glass, metal pinboards, bricks, shrink plastic, and flashlight
Glass 10 × 4.5 × 8.5
installation with variable dimension
This installation dwells in the uneasy space between balance and collapse, where equilibrium exists only under constant threat. Shrink plastic tightens around cement bricks like a held breath, while a fragile glass form—bruised, scarred, and visibly strained—bears the marks of pressure and survival. Pinboards press against the shrink-wrapped surface, outlining and framing the glass as well as the edges of the plastic wrap.
Viewers are handed a flashlight and invited into a slow act of searching. Light glides across transparent glass, activating reflections and distortions that echo early cinematic technologies. The work remains perpetually unstable and mutable, shifting with every movement of light. The work seduces only to invite a viewer in, to reveal a condition of precariousness.
Pegah Pasalar
Left with desire for one more gamble بنماند هیچش الا هوس قمار دیگر 2023
From the ongoing project Exodus Pathology
Hand-blown glass, transparent air-filled balloons, cinder blocks, light
Glass 10 × 4.5 × 8.5
installation with variable dimension
This work presents a single referent — the form of an inflated balloon — twice: once as a rigid glass body marked by heat and pressure, and once as an air-filled surface that functions as a shifting and deforming pedestal. The glass depends on the inflatable structure for its suspension, while the inflatable slowly loses form under its weight. Through this interdependence, the sculpture establishes a system of tension in which stability is provisional and resistance is located not in hardness but in elasticity. Since the inflatable continuously sags and loses air, the work unfolds in time, operating as a performative, time-based material condition rather than a fixed sculptural object.
These works begin on the reverse side of historical maps by al-Idrisi, the 12th-century Arab geographer and cartographer whose atlas was the first to accurately depict Eurasia. The pages are not blank: they carry the ghosted pressure of ink from the front—leaking, bleeding, and imprinting through paper over centuries. What appears here are not the maps themselves, but their residues: faint coastlines, distorted grids, half-erased geographies.
From a pirated version of his book, I screen shot these verso pages and print them, treating them as fragile terrains already shaped by time, moisture, and archival decay. From there, I intervene carefully—choosing what to trace, what to underline, what to leave untouched. Small gestures of color, line, and dot become acts of attention rather than illustration. The original cartography remains present but illegible, surfacing only as pressure, stain, and trace.
These works occupy a space between scientific mapping and mnemonic drift. They echo colonial and pre-colonial regimes of knowledge—systems that sought to define, measure, and contain the world—yet here those systems have lost their authority. What remains is a porous geography: unstable, wounded, and open to reinterpretation.
By working with the backside of al-Idrisi’s maps, I am drawn to what history leaves behind but does not fully erase: the underside of knowledge, the afterimage of power, the material memory embedded in paper. These drawings do not map places as they are or were. They map what persists when representation collapses—when borders, names, and coordinates dissolve, but the ground still remembers.
Archival inkjet print on paper with watercolor, ink, and graphite
8.3 × 11.7 in
