Essay on Gut Feelings 2.0 by Siavash Minoukadeh
The pattern on the shrine is geometric. Its shapes are precise, angular and interlock exactly,
the pattern endlessly reproducible. It can be extended without end in any direction. Up.
Down. Left. Right. Into the past, speaking to the Esfahani ceramic tilework it has been
inspired by. Into the future, it forms an echo of the circuit boards and semiconductors and
further still into a future where the circuit boards have melted and we have gone back to the
ceramic tilework.
I find it funny that this form of art was first developed to try and capture divinity, that
somehow the pure rationality of geometry and mathematics was able to be reconciled with
the pure irrationality of faith. I suppose these approaches could find common ground in the
masculinity of a pattern such as this one, a pattern that can assert its own perfection, a
pattern that doesn’t leave space for difference, for the organic, the fleshy, the soft.
And yet, here is the organic, the fleshy, the soft. Despite the unforgiving habitat of sheet
metal, look up at the top edges of the shrine and you will see bulbs and floral forms taken
from rug patterns, hands reaching to each other all finding a home amongst the unforgiving
authority of geometry. Here is a hint that this shrine, others like it, the culture they were
formed in, just might have some seeds for something irregular, something queer.
A shrine like this is where worshippers, unknown to each other, come together for a shared
euphoria, brushing their bodies against each other, kissing the metal and leaving their
tokens tied to it. A religiously - maybe erotically - (the two blur more than either would like)
charged but anonymous moment of utopia.
There’s a green glow seeping out of the shrine. Isn’t it tempting? To try and peer through the
holes in the pattern and try and catch a glimpse? The shrine is teasing you. Look but don’t
touch. Catch a glimpse through the gaps, without making it too obvious. Be furtive. Looking,
worship, as a form of cruising. An act of slipping into a space not made for you, but finding
yourself, your community, your ancestors there just for a moment.
If a shrine can be cruised, where else in the straight lines of history can we find queer
presences? The glowing contents of the shrine, also reproduced in ceramic elsewhere here,
suggest my grandmother’s trinkets might be one place. Some classic kitsch found in an
Iranian cabinet, Haftsin table or bridal spread sit alongside a replica dildo. When all cast in
the same material, are they really that different? They at once suggest a potential past
where these objects could have sat together, testify to the present where the artist has sat
them together, and invite us to make a future where they do indeed sit together.
This is the generosity of Gut Feelings 2.0. The works here are an act of prying open, of
queering and of adding to what we know as Iranian-ness. What results is a generative
instability, where new speculative futures for queer Iranian identity and its material histories
might disrupt the rigid pattern.
Siavash is a London-based curator, creative producer and writer working in film and moving image.
Siavash.cc