Reza Aramesh’s Site of the Fall: Study of the Renaissance Garden Setting Stage for Tragic Pleasure interrogates themes of power, vulnerability, and the duality of beauty and suffering. His ceramic sculptures, informed by classical Greco-Roman aesthetics, draw on the visual language of idealized nudes while subtly subverting traditional narratives of masculinity. In his Action series, the human body is positioned within a liminal space between pleasure and tragedy, reflecting on historical and contemporary acts of violence, oppression, and resistance. 

Aramesh’s work oscillates between past and present, merging the grandeur of Renaissance and Baroque compositions with urgent sociopolitical themes. His figures, fragmented and recontextualized, evoke both the sensuality and brutality inherent in historical depictions of the human form. By engaging with classical motifs while confronting their underlying structures of dominance, Aramesh challenges viewers to reconsider the narratives that shape our understanding of beauty, power, and suffering. 

Farideh Lashai’s Catching the Moon and When I Count, There Are Only You… But When I Look, There Is Only a Shadow engage deeply with themes of history, violence, and remembrance. In When I Count…, Lashai reimagines Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War, stripping the original etchings of their human figures and projecting fleeting animations onto the empty landscapes. This interplay of absence and presence creates a haunting meditation on the cycles of conflict and the erasure of individual suffering over time. The title, drawn from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the evocative use of Chopin’s Nocturne 21 in C minor, further enhance the work’s reflective and ephemeral nature.