Study of Sweat cloth as an Object of Desire, is a series of life sized mens underwear carved from Carrara marble, intended to be displayed on the floor. The marble is shaped through deep cutting and hand polishing by master carvers to achieve an illusion of garments in conversation with historical European sculpture traditions. Each unique work, whose title is engraved on the underside, refers to a set of historical dates and geographies of detention centres that the artist seeks to illuminate.
The ongoing investigation by Reza Aramesh into various representations of violence and its promises speak to his formative years of having left Iran as a teenager. While Aramesh is unsentimental about his conceptual practice and rarely refers to his personal experiences in his art, there is an overall theme that addresses his unwavering commitment to human injustice. He is interested in the inflection point where empathy and cruelty can pivot on a moments notice.
The ethos of the series is to provide an experience of materiality and to engage with the representation of soft materials transformed into carved stone. In addition, the ongoing series provide a specific language from the event of being proverbially stripped of dignity in situations of subjugation and duress. Specifically, the event of being arrested and removed to a prison. Each object represents the relinquishing of the last personal garment, a pair of underwear, before being processed from a human being into a human statistic.