I sell stories or I should say the idea of storytelling. I try to remind people how we could change the world by making ideas and stories into images and sculptural things. There is a constant questioning at the core of my practice. The story you are looking at here is called sound barrier and its inspired by the time when I saw masking tape for the first time in my life at age of 6, during the Iran-Iraq war in 80s. This exact vintage pattern was what we had in our home. My father and my older brother put X shape tapes on windows all around the house to prevent glass from shattering during the bombing. That is what I thought at least. Later, I realised that it was not in fact for when the bomb went off but for the sound barrier.
The sound barrier or sonic barrier is the large increase in aerodynamic drag and other undesirable effects experienced by an aircraft or other object when it approaches the speed of sound. When an aircraft breaks the sound barrier these sound waves begin to pile up in front of objects. If an object has sufficient acceleration, it can burst through this barrier of sound waves, and this is what happened when the jets dropped the bombs and left. The masking tape was there to protect us from aftermath!
Although the glass image in the painting is unharmed and is even pleasing to the eye, the title of the work shows its relevance to explosion, ”here the glass, which is supposed to be the connection between the inside and the outside, looks healthy, so maybe the real explosion occurred inside.
( This piece was the selected painting for Mother art prize 2022 at Zabludowics collection London )