Shadi Yasrebi | "A Shield To Hide Behind": Dastan's Basement

Dastan’s Basement plays host to “A Shield To Hide Behind” by Shadi Yasrebi, starting on Friday, February 4, 2022. The exhibition is Shadi Yasrebi’s first collaboration with Dastan’s Basement at her third solo exhibition. The exhibition will be on view until Friday, February 18.

In this exhibition,by taking influence from Islamic Architecture, the artist is using elements like domes and arches – which she metaphorically calls “sanctuary” – to present an “unsafe” image of the urban environment. Yasrebi scrapes the surface of cardboard pieces to create her works and offers it as a mundane reminder to viewers. Elements of Islamic Architecture interact with their real geometric forms in an abstract realm. Simplified, from each cardboard piece a geometric form emerges and is riveted to another. Yasrebi arrives at an impressionable surface from the ideals of Islamic aesthetics, which insist on its materiality through injury and deformity. In other words, in her artistic practice, the artist brings allegorical images down to earth. The cardboard is scratched, sometimes poked, in a primitive and willful way to leave signs on the body of the city. These visual elements appear next to each other in relative equilibrium and, ultimately, against a seemingly profound reality, the memory of the city is etched on the surface of the cardboard. Every scratch or perforation is a peeping hole into another layer of the cardboard as if each injury is narrating its destiny.

Shadi Yasrebi (b. 1989) is a graduate of Graphic Design from Azad University. She lives and works in Tehran. She held her first solo exhibition, “Akhal’, at Nak Gallery (2018, Tehran) and has participated in group exhibitions, such as “Who Am I?” at Mayten’s Project (2022, Toronto). This exhibition is her third solo.