Leila Mirzakhani | "Stones and the River" : Electric Room 46/50

Dastan in collaboration with Empty Space Studio is pleased to announce “Stones and the River”, a presentation by Leila Mirzakhani at Electric Room. The show, an installation comprised of river stones and two drawings will be open to public view from August 24 to August 29, 2018.
Leila Mirzakhani (b. 1978, Tehran) is an Iranian visual artist based in Rome. Working in the fields of drawing, painting, video and installation, her work has been exhibited in five solo exhibitions in Tehran and Rome. Using a meditative and poetic approach, she aims to recreate instinctual and natural human experiences in her works. “Stones and the River” is an installation based on smooth river stones. The current show is the third iteration of this series that started during an artist residency in Italy when the artist contemplated on human experiences in nature. Using natural elements such as stones, she focused on their textures and natural formation which resulted in a series of drawings (“Vibrations”) and the installation.
Discussing the work, Leila Mirzakhani writes: “The stones leave the mountain and fall into the river, they are transformed, made smooth through erosion and flow in the river. This is a metaphor of life: we travel like pieces of stone and experience different things. The stones in this show are very normal stones gathered from rivers; they exhibit marks of this journey on their bodies: they are made to glow using silver paint so as to value the experiences of humans that are like gems.”
She continues: “The river is represented by two drawings (from “Vibrations” series) in the space —two vibrating waves that have been meticulously drawn using blue pencils on paper. These two have been created without prior planning and by repeating lines from one side of the paper, and are results of an improvisatory technique. They are like when we throw a piece of stone into water to appreciate the waves that the water decides to create.”
Empty Space Studio is an arts studio created in 2018 by artist Mahdyar Jamshidi. Following a program of artist talk sessions, Empty Space Studio has contributed to the current Electric Room project by suggesting and hosting an artist talk on Tuesday, August 28.