Peyman Konjkav | "Memory-Remomy (Demolish & Rebuild)": Dastan's Basement

Sohrab Mahdavi (DB) — In “Memory-Remomy” at Dastan's Basement, opening July 23, 2021, Payman Konjkav draws us into demolition and reconstruction. The anagrammatic title, “Memory-Remomy (Demolish & Rebuild)”, presents 32 drawing until August 6 to the Basement visitors.

Drawings of Peyman Konjkav explore the architecture of memory and the process of reconstructing past events. What happens when, in their summoning, images of a past undergo transformations? Our bodies are home to visual fragments in whose most basic renderings our minds sparse, cut, and staple them. The act of demolition and reconstruction, this butterfly metamorphosis of memory into remomy, creates its own world, which is "a mixture of events, images, engenderings, and imagination." Personas lift off from faces, heads and body parts are elided, in reincarnations, reaching their avatars, which are perhaps the beginning of an end.

Payman Konjkav (b. 1985 in Tehran) received his BA in Graphic Design from the University of Art and Architecture. His works of drawing and painting followed an academic arc. Having become familiar with graphic design software and video editing software, he became interested in graphic and somewhat nostalgic forms belonging to the 2000s. using motifs of that decade, he tried to establish a relationship between academic forms. In his previous works, we chance upon traces of memory from a not-so-distant-past through a painterly outlook. He is looking at his memories with a more contemporary and less dependent on pure painting preoccupation with memory.