Mina Mohseni & Amirnasr Kamgooyan | "Memento Mori": Electric Room 41/50

Dastan is pleased to announce “Memento Mori”, a presentation by Mina Mohseni and Amir Nasr Kamgooyan at Electric Room. The multi-dimensional installation will be open to public view from July 20 to July 25, 2018.
While they have been living together for more than twelve years, “Memento Mori” is the couple’s first experience of working together on a single artistic project. The project was conceived after the two artists reviewed the shared life experiences and ended up thinking about one of the most recent additions to their house: a four-poster bed they had designed together.
While it explores some of the most personal aspects of their life, the bed stands symbolically in the exhibition space as reminder of multiple phases and aspects of life —birth, sleep, love (storge/eros), pleasure, pain, illness, darkness, life and death. The viewer enters the space looking at the couple’s bed from above, like visiting a grave, with the bed-sheet lit from beneath. The sheet covers a drawing made by the two which becomes blurry or relatively sharper when affected by movement or changes in the space’s air flow.
The title “Memento Mori” (Latin: “remember that you have to die”) acts not as a reference to the Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, but rather a rereading of “Carpe Diem” (Latin: “seize the day”). The soil pyramids bear an allusion to life and death, and at the same time embody a small drawing imprint in the room showing the engulfment of life in a void which itself works as a bridge between the drawings on paper and the four-poster bed.
Conceiving the installation, the two artists simultaneously started to work on a series of collaborative drawings “like a game of tic-tac-toe” with one’s work is complemented by the other in turns. Although the two have different focuses and practices in their artistic work, they share interest in a wide variety of subject matters and living together discuss diverse issues every day, as reflected in their collaborative drawings which show evolutions of ideas, techniques and streams of thought.

Mina Mohseni (b. 1984, Shiraz, Iran) is a graduate of painting from Soore University (Shiraz) and Isfahan University of Art (Isfahan). Her work has been featured in one solo exhibition in Tehran and numerous group shows in Iran, Europe and America.
Amir Nasr Kamgooyan (b. 1982, Tehran, Iran) is a graduate of graphic design from Soore University (Shiraz). His work has been featured in three solo exhibitions in Tehran, most recently “Secrets of Oblivion” at Aaran Gallery, and more than twenty group shows in Iran, Europe and America.