From without, I stepped within
Dualities are perhaps the simplest way to describe our present condition a biological state that divides everything into two separate and detached sides, much like the grade school monitors of long ago who would draw a straight line across the blackboard to separate the “good” from the “bad.”
Yet the work of the artist and of art itself can be to move beyond these binaries,
to linger on the edges,
to inhabit the thresholds.
This exhibition emerges from the artist’s life on that border,
a reflection of these very dualities:
individuals exiled from the center to the margins who now return to reclaim the center, turning the history of their marginal existence into a narrative that demands rereading.
Or perhaps living in the center remains a dream a vision held by those who have endured life on the margins and now set that dream before the eyes of others,
the viewers.
Saeed Babavand
Autumn 2025
