Written for the show Your Place is Empty (2024) at Conners Conners Gallery
*Jät khali is an old Farsi expression, translating literally to "Your place is empty. This poetic phrase expresses so much more than its English counterpart "wish you were here", the archetypal message scrawled on a postcard. The phrase in Farsi articulates feelings of lack, loss and longing, of leaving space for someone who is not there. Like this saying, Hootan Heydar's artworks speak to absence; an acknowledgement of the empty spaces people leave behind, their echoes and traces.
Heydari was a young child in 1979 when his family left Iran; his memories of home from those early years no doubt faded. Memory is notoriously slippery and unreliable. Heydaris artistic practice is concerned with memory, absence and longing; the impulse to return to a place once known but lost. He uses biographically and culturally symbolic objects and materials that speak of his birth country. Reproductions of family photographs, images of the Islamic revolution, documents and furniture are imbued with a poetic potency.
Archival family photographs are a frequent subject and material in Heydari's artwork, though deliberately obscured, so that the people and scenes captured are no longer comprehensible. Heydari engages these images in repetitive processes of obfuscation: actions such as printing, dipping, dying, burning, shredding and stacking. Materials including graphite, fire, plaster and pomegranate ('anar' - a fruit native to Iran) are employed in the process of erasing and obscuring these images. The act of making and the act of remembering are entangled; the compulsive repetitive actions becoming a form of meditation and memorialisation.
Influenced by Francis Alÿs' use of futility as a means of resistance, Heydari embraces the repetition of futile actions as a tool to resist erasure or loss: repetition of actions and processes; repetition of imagery; repetition of objects archived in neat stacks; repetition of words written in ink or etched into the glass window of a framed artwork; repetition of sounds endlessly looped. Through repetition, language, image and memory are captured, preserved and honoured. Heydari plays with slippages between the past and the present, acknowledging the tensions that exist between then and now, what is remembered and what is imagined, what is lost and what remains.
The whisper of two opposing phrases sounds from a record player in the corner of the room, repeating over and over like an echo: "Yeki bood... Yeki nabood.."
"One was there... One was not there..." Absence and presence. Presence and absence.