Excerpts from a curatorial text to Riyas Komu’s new show

Like many other contemporary artists, Riyas Komu is equally perplexed by our apparent lack of conviction to resist war and to think in terms of defense and offense alone. His new set of works showcased in Tehran raise some pertinent issues in this context. The curator of the show, Shaheen Merali, mentions:

“His work has always been a striking and constant reflection on the contemporary condition where so much remains at stake, here, after many thousands of years of
fear as our heritage, we remain ready to move into another ‘situation’; readily abandoning our wit and knowledge and surrendering to the forces that break our bonds and our lives. His work often appears to be a multiple space in which we're left grasping the moment, in order to release results or meaning.

The sculptures stray between a mystical place of gothic pedagogy, where signs and power make a heady mix, suggestive of knowledge in a fixed monumental strait, and certain plays with the effects of a raging world in the 20th and 21st century. For instance, his sculpture ‘Royal Screw’, works between a medieval tool of defense and attack, the sword, and, by sculpting the blade into advancing spiral threads that keeps something in place, constructs a certainty for the destiny of a moving object. It questions the modes of daily reality, are these certainties or sexual dispositions of ‘screwing’ around?

‘Safe to Light’ is a set of reminiscences of fear and omission, the work is a weapon, an ode to weapons and castration, in reproducing the existing orders in fascinating twists. It is a reminder that so many places and so much time have been involved in sheer brutality that now we seem to be tied to a future by a shared histories of violence and violation, that seems to guide us to an ever more dangerous future.

In all the works, the artist seems to argue, peoples, more so than individuals, now more than ever before, have the power to assert criticalities into certain vacuous sites in order to transform and make history."